Sometime shortly after 4 p.m. on Wednesday, July 13, Margaret “Maggie” O’Connor was at her home at 8 Windwood Drive with her mother and three of her four siblings, when the eight-year-old climbed into the family’s 2004 Suburban alone. The vehicle began to roll backward down the hilly driveway out of control and eventually left the roadway and crashed into a grove of trees about halfway down.

Inside the house, Maggie’s mother, Rose, heard the noise and rushed outside, too late to prevent the sudden tragedy.

Maggie was “partially ejected” from the car and died before emergency responders arrived on scene, said Brookfield Detective Michael O’Brien, who is handling the investigation.

O’Brien said that investigators have not yet been able to determine how the vehicle got in motion but stated that the Suburban is now in the police impound lot where the Accident Investigation Team will analyze what happened.

“She was a fun, crazy little girl,” 12-year-old James O’Connor, the eldest of the five children, said of his little sister Wednesday, remarking that she was an active girl who loved to swim, especially at the family’s summer lake home.

“She was always outside; they had to drag her in filthy at night,” said Jane Beal, whose daughter Emma was a close friend’s of Maggie’s and would be equally dirty from play at days’ end. “They’re always filthy, covered in mud."

Beal said Maggie could be shy but that once you got know her she was a “giggler.”

“She was a sweet, gentle, quiet little girl,” she said. “A very beautiful soul, inside and out.”

“She was just a little angel — with the blondest hair and the bluest eyes,” longtime family friend Cindy Grossman said Wednesday when reached at the O’Connor’s home. “She was really, really sweet.”

Grossman said members of the community who knew Maggie have been sending their condolences and all of them had something special to say about the young girl, who would have been in third grade in the fall.

“Even her bus driver called today,” Grossman noted. “She was a special little girl.”

The magnitude of the loss has yet to truly set in for the family, Grossman said.

“They’re still in disbelief right now,” she said, adding that Maggie’s extended family is on their way, flying in “from all over the globe,” including as far away as California and Russia.

“They have a large, loving family,” Beal said. She said Maggie was particularly close with her cousins, which number into the 20s.

For now, family and friends will mass together, prop each other up and try to find a way to cope.