WHITEWRIGHT, Texas (KXII/Gray News) – A family is mourning the loss of a 6-year-old boy who was killed in a UTV crash earlier this month.
Colten Thompson-Winquist was riding on a UTV on Nov. 16 with his “Grandma Jal” when they crashed.
“They were going down a trail to the lake that they have taken a million times,” said Jeffrey Jackson. “For some reason, they hit an embankment is what I’m told and it rolled, he fell out and it rolled up on him.”
Jackson and Melissa Caffrey have had custody of Colten since he was 4 months old.
Caffrey said Colten died without suffering prolonged pain.
“The coroner said that he died from blunt force trauma to the head,” she said. “Didn’t make a sound. He didn’t wake up. He went from sitting next to Grandma Jal and happy and in his best life to in heaven.”
Jackson and Caffrey said Colten was a joy to be around and had just joined the Boy Scouts.
They say before his death, Colton asked, “Where do you go if you die?”
“He started saying things like, ‘I want to go to heaven.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, buddy, a long time from now when you get old, but you’ve got to stay here. And he was like, ‘Yeah, but it’s beautiful and it’s peaceful.’ I was like, ‘Where is this coming from?’” Caffrey said.
Jackson and Caffrey are mental health counselors for a school district and are now using the advice they often give to others.
“We always tell our clients that, feel your feelings and to let them out and never try to hold them in,” Jackson said. “We also have to tell ourselves life does have to move on to get out of bed and to do those things.”
They say Grandma Jal, the driver during the crash, is heartbroken.
“She apologizes every time she’s seen us,” Caffrey said. “She’s very much like the survivor’s guilt of ‘Why not me? Why wasn’t it me? Why couldn’t I have rolled the other way?‘”
The family says donations to their GoFundMe will help fund Colten’s funeral service and allow them to have more time to grieve before returning to work.
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