On the afternoon of 15 September 2026 the motion-activated cameras at the under-fives play area on Merriam Close in Brantham, Suffolk, captured three-year-old Noah Woods at 2.13pm running and spinning the roundabout beside the relative who had brought him there as part of a weekly routine that had begun on the day he was born. The last frame showing him still inside the play equipment zone was timed at 2.37pm. Between those two recorded moments and the point at which the relative lost sight of him roughly two hundred metres further on, Noah pᴀssed through a gap in the internal fencing that separated the play area from the adjacent memorial garden, then through an open gate, and continued along a path on the new housing estate in the direction of Decoy Pond.

Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Connick of Suffolk Police told the short hearing that opened and adjourned the inquest on 25 September that the relative had followed closely, calling after the child, yet after that distance Noah could no longer be seen. A second man who heard the concern joined the immediate search before police were contacted and the large-scale operation began. The next afternoon Metropolitan Police divers located the boy’s body approximately five metres from the bank of Decoy Pond, among submerged tree roots, in water estimated at 1.8 metres deep. Paramedics confirmed death at 16:31 BST; later that evening his mother, Charlie Peck, formally identified him at Ipswich Hospital.

A post-mortem examination conducted at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge was described to ᴀssistant Coroner Jyoti Gill as still requiring further investigation before a final medical cause of death could be recorded. Police have consistently stated that the death is not being treated as suspicious. The six-minute inquest hearing heard that the visit itself formed part of an ordinary pattern: the same relative, the same playground, the same play of chase and exploration. What the available CCTV cannot show, because it is motion-triggered rather than continuous, is the precise sequence in which the child moved from the last recorded position inside the play area through the gap and the open gate.

The parish council later noted that while there was a break in the internal fencing under construction to separate the play area from the memorial garden, the wider site remained enclosed by perimeter fencing. The inquest remains adjourned to a date still to be fixed. Until that fuller hearing, the public record consists of those timed frames, the relative’s account of pursuit and loss of sight, the path toward the pond, and the recovery of the body the following day in water deep enough that a three-year-old who had been non-verbal, partially deaf, and still undergoing ᴀssessment for autism would have had little chance of self-rescue once submerged among the roots. Family members have asked that he be remembered for the laughter and the chase rather than the final minutes that the cameras and the witnesses can only partially reconstruct.