Grieving family of Cooper Steele in limbo following mysterious death

Bundaberg mother Vicki Steele has vowed to do everything in her power to ensure other families never have to endure the debilitating grief her family is experiencing following the inexplicable loss of her ‘loving, wonderful boy’.

The family of Cooper Steele, the student who inexplicably died in his sleep at the age of 21, has vowed to do everything in her power to ensure other families don’t experience their debilitating grief.

When Vicki Steele said goodbye to her son, Cooper, after spending the week with him in Brisbane, Cooper gave her a farewell hug.

A generous and compulsive hugger, the embrace itself was nothing out of the ordinary, but its intensity this time stuck in Vicki’s mind.

“At the time I thought ‘oh my god, that’s such a hard hug, you haven’t hugged me this tight in a very long time’,” Vicki said, choking up at the memory.

“And it turns out that that was the last hug.”

Vicki Steele has loving memories of the tight hug her son Cooper gave her the last time they said goodbye.

A well-known Bundaberg and Bargara socialite, Vicki had been in Brisbane to accompany Cooper, 21, on a series of medical appointments investigating a recent spate of seizures in which he would become paralysed.

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Unsure of the diagnosis, Vicki said neurological specialists told her “messages weren’t being sent from his brain to the rest of his body”.

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The first incidents of paralysis around August were fairly minor, with Cooper putting down the difficulty he experienced in waking and getting out of bed to “sleeping funny”.

But a more significant incident at the beginning of September in which one of his legs became temporarily paralysed, had the family more concerned and sparked a round of tests.

Despite his apparently worsening condition, Vicki’s focus was on finding out the cause of Cooper’s seizures, not for once thinking that they were signs of anything more serious than a chronic illness that would need to be managed throughout the rest of his life

“They were doing CAT scans and MRIs, trying to find out the root cause of why the signals were being blocked, which for someone who’s 21, that’s an old person thing,” she said.

“Nobody thought for a second that anything like this would happen.”

After the “light, airy, fun and entertaining” week in Brisbane with Cooper and his partner, Ellisa, Vicki returned to her Bargara home for some time with her husband, Gavin, a high-ranking official at Bundaberg Regional Council, before going back to Brisbane for another round of appointments as she had planned.

Cooper's father Gavin (middle), a General Manager of Community and Environment at Bundaberg Regional Council, was "shattered" by the loss of Cooper, pictured here also with his "best mate" brother Harrison (left).

On the night of Friday, October 13, Vicki answered a knock at the door to find two police officers standing on her doorstep.

“We’ve got some terrible news,” one of the officers said after entering Vicki’s home, to which Vicki responded “which one of my children are you here to tell me about?”

“And it was Coop,” Vicki said.

“My soul just shattered, so did my husband’s.”

After lying down in bed earlier that day, Cooper died in his sleep around 3.45pm, with Ellise unable to revive him.

While the coroner is yet to provide a definitive cause of death, doctors have told Vicki that Cooper’s heart or lungs stopped functioning and he went peacefully.

In the days since, Vicki and Gavin have returned to Brisbane to view Cooper’s body where he is being held at the John Tonge Centre, a mortuary in the aptly named Coopers Plains in South Brisbane.

Cooper "loved family", and was extremely close with his brother Harrison (left), 24, and sister Madison (right), 25.

While distraught at the loss of “our baby,” the youngest of three siblings, Vicki is consoled by the gentle smile she saw on Cooper’s face has he lay in the mortuary.

“We saw him yesterday, and he actually had a bit of a smile on his face,” she said.

“Like he was having a fantastic dream, and he just ran with it.”

Cooper’s siblings, Madison and Harrison, are naturally distraught at the loss of their baby brother with whom they were so close along with Madison’s children.

“He was a loving, family oriented, wonderful boy,” Vicki remembered.

“He was very affectionate and very loyal … he just loved the family.

“He actually never put himself first, he was always very mindful and considerate of everybody else’s feelings.”

While Cooper and Harrison were “best mates”, Cooper had a large group of friends with whom he would go out to nightclubs and pubs, for a while going to Kinkuna beach parties where they would drive their 4WD cars on the ocean’s shore.

Cooper (second from the right) had a large group of friends who are now trying to come to terms with his sudden death.

An academic high achiever, “sometimes too smart, he thought he knew it all”, Cooper moved to Brisbane with Ellisa to study biochemistry at Queensland University of Technology with dreams of becoming a compound pharmacist.

Inveterate travellers, Vicki and Gavin showed their children the world, with Cooper celebrating his eighth birthday in Paris and 14th in New York.

Friends the family had made through their travels are now sending their condolences after learning of Cooper’s death.

“We’ve had messages from all over the world, it’s just been incredible how far away people are reaching from not only in distance, but in times of our lives,” Vicki said.

“We have to remind ourselves about the fact that we did some pretty amazing things as a family.”

Cooper Steele was living with his partner, Ellisa, in Brisbane, on the cusp of embarking on a new phase of their lives after completing their university studies.

Now staying in Brisbane with Madison, surrounded and supported by family and friends, Vicki has had to put plans for a funeral and memorial, the normal events that help families grieve after a tragic loss, on hold until medical staff can determine the cause of Cooper’s death.

“If they can finally give us a definitive answer on why Cooper didn’t wake up, then we have a cause,” Vicki said.

“But at the moment, we don’t know, there’s nothing.”

Once the coroner completes their investigations, Vicki has committed to furthering research and awareness into the condition that has torn her family’s life apart.

“He’ll be with us at every event, he’s just not there yet,” she said.

“I need to find out what happened to him, so that we can make sure that other families don’t have to go through this.”

Originally published as Grieving family of Cooper Steele in limbo following mysterious death