If you had a question for Corday D’Milo Duffy, he had an answer. He was only 6 years old, but his personality set him apart, the owner of his daycare center said Monday.
“He was funny, he was smart, he was an amazing child,” Sharese Crawl, owner of All-Star Learning Center in College Park, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He had that unique personality, so different. He had an answer for everything.”
But as children returned to center’s summer camp Monday, many learned that Corday would not be back. Early Saturday, his lifeless body was pulled from Lake Allatoona, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said.
Corday, of College Park, was found early Saturday, several hours after his family reported him missing from their campsite, Lt. Jay Baker with the Sheriff's Office said. Corday was at the campsite with his grandmother, aunt, other siblings and cousins when he wandered away from his family's tent sometime after 7:15 p.m.
Dozens of searchers from various agencies spent hours looking on land and in the water for Corday, who was found about 25 to 30 feet from shore in water about 4 to 5 feet deep, Baker said.
“It appears he may have walked out on the log and then fell in water just over his head,” Baker said Saturday morning.
An autopsy was conducted by the GBI, which determined that Corday drowned. He had recently completed kindergarten at Feldwood Elementary School in College Park.
Corday and some of his five siblings had attended All-Star Learning Center for just over a year, Crawl said. The siblings didn’t attend the summer camp program Friday so that they could go take the family’s annual camping trip, she said.
The children’s mother, Corinna Duffy, was not on the camping trip and was caring for another of her children, who is disabled and requires a feeding tube, Crawl said.
Crawl and her employees at the center are hoping to raise money to assist the Duffy family with funeral costs and other expenses. Online contributions can be made on a GoFundMe site created for the Duffy family. Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced.
Corday is the third person to drown this year in Lake Allatoona, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
Chance Werner, 18, drowned May 25 while playing a game in which people launch someone off a dock in a shopping cart, The AJC previously reported. Earlier this month, Debra Hansard, 56, died after she was found floating in water, according to the state DNR.
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