The tragic story behind how Joshua from Welcome to Plathville suddenly died in 2008
Kim Plath was pregnant at the time
Joshua Plath is often spoken about on Welcome to Plathville. The family has been grieving his sudden death ever since it happened in 2008, way before the show hit TLC. They’ve visited his tombstone at a cemetery, and the story of how Joshua died is really tragic.
He was just one years old when he died in a farming accident that took place on the Plath farm in the fall of 2008. Kim was using her car to move fruit trees on their Georgia property and did not realise that her young son was nearby until she suddenly hit him.
Kim admitted she “ran over” her son and said: “I had just seen him, and I thought it was okay.” She was pregnant at the time, as her daughter Amber was born in February 2009, five months later, at home. Investigator Daniel Singletary ruled that it was an accident.
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“The mother was pulling the vehicle forward, she’d been doing yard work, and thought she had accounted for all the kids,” Daniel told Thomasville Times Enterprise. “She had seven children, ages 15 months to 10 years old, and they were all outside playing.”
He said she “moved the vehicle forward and discovered she’d run over the youngest.” Deputies responded to the 911 call, he said, and emergency personnel saw Plath trying to administer CPR to her son. “Medical personnel took over and tried to save the child.”
Joshua was born in April 2007. “I probably am my biggest accuser, and that was a battle that I dealt [with] the first year that he died. I was pretty much just shut down,” Kim said. Moriah Plath, who was six when Joshua died, was “really close” by when it happened.
“I watched it all happen, so sometimes I’ll still remember that like it was yesterday, like a flashback. After Joshua died, nobody would talk about it, like it was something that didn’t happen,” Moriah revealed, while her sister Lydia said the family “just didn’t talk about it.”
Lydia revealed on the Unplanned podcast how she thinks Joshua’s death has “more to do with her parents’ divorce than the show.” She said, “When that happened, we didn’t know how to talk about it. The hardest thing in our childhood, we kind of just bred that.”
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