Announcement of the accidental death of the 4-year-old daughter of forever-troubled ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson at her Phoenix home brought back some haunting memories.
One of the stories in our 2006 "Murder City" series was called "The Case of the Two Abigails," which concerned the tragic deaths in separate cases of two little girls who both happened to be named Abigail.
One of the Abigails died at the hands of her father, Eric Natzel, who locked her in a toy box after beating her. She suffocated inside that box. Natzel is serving 25 years in the Arizona State Prison at the present time.
The second Abigail was 2 1/2 when she died at her parents' east Phoenix apartment. The child stuck her hands out of her crib and grabbed an electrical cord entwined with a decorative chain that ran from a ceiling fan down a wall to an outlet.
Somehow, she tugged the cord into her crib in the shape of a "noose," and strangled herself. Phoenix police investigated the case, which they later deemed a tragic accident.
The death of both little girls still haunts investigators and others who were around the investigations.
Little Exodus Tyson was on life support until today, when she officially was pronounced dead. The little girl was playing on a treadmill when her head apparently slipped inside a cord hanging beneath the console.
Sadly, many children die of suffocation in the United States each year, most of them under the age of one.
The only possible consolation for the grieving Tyson family is that, according to a county medical examiner, the child would have been in no pain before slipping into unconsciousness.
