Noah Woods was three years old, non-verbal, partially deaf and being ᴀssessed for autism, and on the afternoon of 15 September 2026 he was doing something his family treated as ordinary. Detective Chief Inspector Matthew Connick told Suffolk Coroner’s Court that the boy from East Bergholt was being looked after by relatives and that the walk to the under-fives play area at Merriam Close in Brantham was part of his normal routine. Motion-activated CCTV placed him in that playground from about 2.13pm until 2.37pm, playing with the relative who had brought him.

Those cameras did not run continuously, so the court was not given an unbroken film of every minute. What the hearing did establish is the sequence that followed the last recorded moment of play. Noah left the play area through a gap in the fence that separated it from the neighbouring memorial garden, then left that garden through an open gate and ran in the direction of Decoy Pond. The relative followed closely, tried to keep up and shouted after him. After about 200 metres, Noah was no longer in sight. A man nearby joined the relative in searching.

Police were then called, and a search that would eventually draw in about 1,300 members of the public began. The pond lies roughly 320 metres from the playground, on the edge of a new housing estate near the River Stour, on the Suffolk side of the EsSєx border. ᴀssistant coroner Jyoti Gill opened and adjourned the inquest in Ipswich on 25 September after a hearing of about six minutes, which the family did not attend. She called it a very sad and tragic death. Suffolk Police have said the death is not being treated as suspicious. A Home Office post-mortem at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on 23 September recorded the medical cause as pending further investigation, so the inquest record still does not contain a final medical answer.

The following afternoon, Metropolitan Police divers recovered Noah about five metres from the bank, within submerged tree roots, in water estimated at 1.8 metres. Paramedics Terrie Hayward and Graham Wareham confirmed death at 4.31pm. His mother, Charlie Peck, formally identified him that evening at Ipswich Hospital. The family’s public request has been that he be remembered as the happy, cheeky, playful child who loved to be loved, who adored his baby brother, and whose bond with that brother they described as incredibly special, rather than only as the child in the search pH๏τographs.