A New Hampshire toddler was found dead Monday morning after she wandered outside her family’s apartment building in sub-zero temperatures and couldn't get back in, The Valley News reported. Police said the 2-year-old’s death “appears to be a bad accident” and is not considered suspicious, according to the report. The incident occurred in Newport, which is about 40 miles northwest of Concord. Neighbors reportedly found the girl’s lifeless body at the bottom of a set of stairs and alerted the family around 7:00 a.m. She was reportedly barefoot and wearing only a nightgown. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Preliminary autopsy results cited in the Valley News indicated the girl died of the elements and hypothermia. The neighbors who found the girl said they had heard a child crying around 4:00 a.m., looked outside, didn’t see anyone, then went back to sleep. The child’s grandfather told the paper that she somehow left the house and wasn’t able to get back inside. It wasn’t immediately clear what led her to leave the apartment. An investigation is ongoing. The Associated Press contributed to this report.<doc-sep>“I saw two people standing there looking down and I wondered why they weren’t doing anything,” said Karon, who lives next door. “Then I heard a scream and a woman came flying out of the apartment, picked the child up, and ran inside.” From her living room window around 7 a.m., Charlotte Karon saw the toddler lying face down at the base of her back stairs, agonizingly close to safety. NEWPORT, N.H. — In what authorities described as a tragic accident, a 2-year-old girl was found dead outside her family’s new apartment here Monday morning after wandering into subzero degree temperatures wearing only her pajamas. Advertisement Police said the toddler, who was barefoot, left the apartment in the middle of the night through an unlocked door and could not find her way back. She was “overcome by the extreme temperatures,” said the town’s police chief, James C. Burroughs. “It does not take long to become disoriented when you are that cold and that small,” Burroughs said. “The tragic nature of this accident is hard to fathom.” Preliminary findings from an autopsy revealed the child died of exposure to the elements and hypothermia, police said. The temperature was minus 8 degrees when the child was found. Sofia Van Schoick. Family photo Police did not identify the child, but relatives said her name was Sofia Van Schoick. The child’s grandfather, Lindsay Van Schoick, said the family moved to the two-story duplex on Maple Street last week from Vermont. His daughter, Courtney Van Schoick, 20, was looking for a new start for her and her twins, Sofia and her brother, Camden. Police said Van Schoick last saw her daughter at 1 a.m. The mother was sleeping upstairs, while her twins slept downstairs, Lindsay Van Schoick said. Police believe the toddler left the apartment between 4 a.m., when a neighbor heard a scream from outside, and 7 a.m., when a neighbor found her body and called 911. Advertisement Courtney Van Schoick declined to comment Monday. On her Facebook page, she had shared a video taken Sunday of her daughter riding in the back of her minivan with a pacifier in her mouth, pointing at something that had caught her eye. “We were having so much fun yesterday . . . I am so greatful [sic] I have this,” Van Schoick wrote. “I love you baby girl.” Lindsay Van Schoick spent Friday night with his grandchildren and dropped them off at the Newport apartment on Saturday. He called his granddaughter “Pedie,” short for peanut, because she was so small. “Bird was her first word,” he said. “And just three months ago, she started identifying animals and making the noises they made. She was really good at making duck noises.” In August 2013, his son Kendall died in a car crash at age 19. The arrival of his daughter’s twins helped ease his grief. “They gave me a reason to get up in the morning and smile,” he said. The child’s mother had recently moved into the apartment. The mother’s boyfriend was also present in the apartment Monday morning, police said. Although the family had moved to Newport so recently that they had not met their neighbors, several people left flowers and stuffed animals at their home. “We are a very close-knit community,” Burroughs said. “People naturally want to rally around the family.” Advertisement Burroughs said investigators are still determining the chain of events that led to the child’s death. He said that it was too early to say whether criminal charges are warranted but that “all signs point to this being a tragic accident.” Burroughs encouraged families to assess the security in their homes and make sure their outside doors have a deadbolt and chain lock if they have young children. “Take all the precautions to keep the uninvited out and your loved ones protected,” he said. Danny McDonald of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @TAGlobe.<doc-sep>
A 2-year-old girl has been found dead in sub-zero temperatures just outside her family home in New Hampshire. Police believe the toddler, identified by the family as Sofia Van Schoick, wandered outside her family's apartment in Newport in the middle of the night and was then unable to get back inside. Police are not treating Sofia's death as suspicious as the incident "appears to be a bad accident." "For reasons that are unknown and probably will never be known, in the middle of the night, she decided to go outside and then wasn't able to get back in," Newport Police Chief Jim Burroughs told Valley News. "At this time, the accident remains under investigation by the Newport Police Department and the Sullivan County Attorney's Office." The child's unresponsive body was found by neighbors around 7 a.m. on January 14. Shane Rowe said his girlfriend was woken up by the sound of a girl crying at around 4 a.m. but they went back to bed after they were unable to see anything. The pair then went outside later that morning and spotted Sofia's body on the ground outside their neighbors' apartment "I saw a little girl next to the bottom of the stairway," Rowe told WMUR. "I said to myself, 'I hope that's a doll.' "My girlfriend came out, and she ran out and she went over and saw that she was actually a child. She banged on the door to alert the parents. "It's got to be devastating because I know if it were my child, I would be torn apart," Rowe added. The girl had wandered out of her home wearing just her pajamas. On the morning in question, temperatures in Newport plummeted to around minus 21 degrees Fahrenheit, according to police. "We'll never know what happened," the girl's grandfather, who did not want to show his face on camera, told local news station WHDH. "Why didn't she go back up the stairs? Did she fall down the stairs? We don't know." Elsewhere, the girl's mother has paid tribute to her "precious" girl following her tragic death. "Sofia was the happiest and smartest toddler you would have ever met," Courtney Van Schoick told Valley News. "She's so loved and missed. "She was the sweetest little thing," she added. "The biggest blue eyes I'd ever seen."