Karen Fermill said she awoke Sunday to an awful premonition — that her seven-year-old daughter, swept away three days earlier in the Thames River in London, would finally be found that day.
Hours later, returning to her Kipps Lane apartment from taking out the trash, Fermill saw two police officers at her door.
She knew.
“They (police) said they had news, and my heart was racing,” the 39-year-old mother of three said. “They found her.”
The body of a child believed to be that of seven-year-old Anna Bielli was located in the river Sunday about 1 p.m., three days into a massive search of the storm-swollen river amid grueling heat wave conditions for emergency crews and volunteers.
“The remains are believed to be in relation to the ongoing missing person investigation,” from Aug. 1, police said, without being more specific.
Authorities had said only that a child under 10 years old entered the river last Thursday afternoon, east of the Adelaide Street North bridge in the city’s northeast, and disappeared into the water. That prompted the massive search of the river system that extended far from that location.
The London Free Press identified the missing girl as Bielli, whose mother told the newspaper about her desperate attempts to save her daughter when she disappeared into the river’s fast-flowing currents during a park outing with her two younger siblings last week.
An 11-year-old boy, who’d been fishing at the river, also described how he tried to save the little girl by extending a stick to her.
Fermill said police told her the remains found matched the description of her daughter that she’d given them, including the clothes she wore last Thursday and the little bow she often wore in her hair.
Sunday, an impromptu memorial to the Northbrae public school pupil broke out on the walkway along the Adelaide Street North bridge, near where she went into the water, with balloons and stuffed animals placed along the bridge railing.
Krista Hodgins and her family dropped off one teddy bear at the bridge and another in the area where police say the body was found. Hodgins said she doesn’t know the girl’s family but has three children of her own and felt impelled to respond.
“That’s why it hit close,” said Hodgins, who added she’d walked the riverbank every day of the search, doing what she could to help.
The remains found Sunday were located in the river north of the Perth and University drives area, said London police Insp. Sean Travis, adding authorities are working to confirm the individual’s identity.
Travis thanked emergency crews and the “many volunteers that showed up over a long, hard weekend in extreme temperatures” to help.
The exhaustive, three-day search of the river system, which soon became a recovery effort, pulled in London police, firefighters and emergency personnel from elsewhere including divers called in from other police forces. An OPP helicopter and aerial drones were also deployed to help.
The first night of the search, police even kept up the effort after darkness fell and searchers came off the river by using spotlights to scour the Thames and its banks from the shore.
Civilians also joined the search early on, until authorities asked people to stay away from the river and leave the job to professionals because of the unsafe conditions in the river swollen from heavy rainstorms that had swept the region. Officials with the area conservation authority reduced the flow of water into the river from the Fanshawe dam to help aid the search.
Fermill said her three young children had been cooling off their feet in a sandy, shallow area of the river on Thursday afternoon after hours spent playing at the North London Athletic Fields near their home when she briefly turned her back to gather up her two younger children to leave, only to find that Anna — who apparently fell into the river — was being carried away in the current.
Unable to swim, Fermill said she went into the river anyway to try to save her daughter but couldn’t reach her and was left yelling for help and trying to get through to 911 on her wet phone.
“It was like my world had turned into pieces, and nobody could help me or Anna at that moment,” she said.
On social media, London police Chief Thai Truong and others expressed sympathy to the family and gratitude to searchers from London and beyond who took part in the extensive operation.
“As we conclude the search for the missing child, our hearts go out to her family during this unimaginable time,” Truong said in a post to X, the former Twitter.
Mayor Josh Morgan, in another post to X, wrote the tragedy that befell the girl’s family was felt across London.
“Everybody is shaken by this immense tragedy, and we all grieve the loss of this young girl. My thoughts are with the child’s family, and I know that sentiment is shared by everyone in our community.”
Police said the investigation has now been reassigned to the department’s major crimes division, which will be helping the coroner’s office.
A funeral for her daughter is planned next weekend but the details haven’t been worked out yet, Fermill said.