The parents of a six-year-old girl who fell to her death after wandering off a cliff have revealed a drink bottle prepared for school still sits untouched in the fridge.
Airlie Montgomery fell from a rock ledge on March 16, just 800m from her home in North Nowra, on the NSW South Coast, after she wandered out of the front yard.
Her body was found at the base of the ledge known as The Grotto, a bushwalking area with clifftop views, which her father Corey Montgomery said she had visited before.
The little girl’s non-verbal autism meant she had ‘no sense of danger’ as she walked to her death last week, according to her grieving father.
Mr Montgomery and Airlie’s mother Katie Amess and told The Daily Telegraph they faced sickening trolls online in the wake of Airlie’s death, with heartless keyboard warriors criticising them over their little girl wandering off while they weren’t looking.
Mr Montgomery said they carried guilt over their daughter’s death.
‘We don’t dismiss those comments, but don’t you duck out to the toilet sometimes?’ Mr Montgomery said.
‘Don’t you come out and see your child opening the kitchen drawer about to grab a knife?
‘Practicality means you can’t be there every second.’
Ms Amess said it was ‘hard having a child with a disability, because all your time goes into her’.
She described bedtimes as a ’20-step process’ and that Airlie ‘wanted me to do everything’.
‘For bath times, she’d climb on my back and we’d play trains so I could get her to the shower, I’d be the carriage and she’d climb on my back … the kids would do the same and follow,’ Ms Amess said.
‘All of our lives revolved around Airlie, it was really hard at times, but I’d take it all back in a heartbeat.’
Mr Montgomery was six hours away, working at a mine site, when his daughter went missing, while at least 1,000 locals came out of their homes to help search for Airlie.
Her body was found in the Shoalhaven River beneath The Grotto four hours after she went missing.
‘Airlie tested us, but she also taught us,’ Mr Montgomery said.
‘She had us drowning at times, but her cheeky laugh could always lift our heads above water in the volatile yet mesmerising world that she lived in.
‘I’ve seen things that no father should ever have to see, Katie’s felt things that no mother should ever have to experience.’
Mr Montgomery will register a charity to help parents of children with autism navigate the NDIS system so his daughter’s death is not in vain.
Ms Amess said she was struggling to find words to express her appreciation for the kindness her family did receive during their ‘unimaginable’ ordeal.
‘Our hearts are in a million pieces as we mourn the loss of our precious Airlie Fairy,’ she said.
‘The outpouring of support we’ve received has been a bright light in the midst of our grief.’
A GoFundMe has raised more than $36,000 to cover the cost of the funeral and provide financial support for the grieving parents to allow them time away from work to mourn their loss.
In April, Airlie’s parents held a purple-themed funeral for the six-year-old.
Many wiped away tears as they stood before the tiny, white coffin which was adorned with purple lilies and lilacs at Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre.
Mr Montgomery and Ms Amess said in a statement at the time that they were the ‘people who understood Airlie’s own little world’.
‘It’s quiet now, I never thought I’d miss the chaos of our days: Incessant vying for attention, late nights and meltdowns, mess and mayhem,’ they said.
‘And yet, how I long for it. The normality of our lives was far from normal.’
He said he often considered himself and his partner to have been alone in raising Airlie, but the community’s response has left him ‘awestruck’.