Welcome to Plathville’s Lydia Plath Opens Up About the Death of Her Brother Joshua

Lydia Plath is opening up about the accidental death of her brother Joshua.

On the latest episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, the Welcome to Plathville star, 21, recalled Joshua’s death from a farming accident on the Plaths’ property in the fall of 2008.

“We had a sibling pass at 17 months when I was four years old,” she recalled. “And it was in the hands of my mom.”

“It was a very tragic accident and because it affected her so much, we couldn’t talk about it,” she said, referring to her mother, Kim Plath. “And so like the deepest, hardest thing that happened in our childhood, we couldn’t talk about around her. So we just didn’t talk about it.”

“And because we didn’t talk about the hardest thing in our life, they just didn’t talk about the deep things. I think that’s just what’s affected us in that way of not talking about the hard things.”

“We didn’t talk about the hardest thing in our childhood,” she concluded.

The accident occurred when Kim was using her car to move fruit trees on the family’s Georgia property and did not realize her 17-month-old son was nearby until she hit him.

“I had just seen him, and I thought it was okay,” Kim, who was pregnant with her eighth child at the time of the accident, recalled on a 2019 episode of Welcome to Plathville. “But I ran over him.” 

The Grady County Sheriff’s Office ruled the death of Joshua accidental following an investigation, the Thomasville Times-Enterprise reported in September 2008.

“The mother was pulling the vehicle forward — she had been doing yard work — and thought she had accounted for all the kids,” Investigator Daniel Singletary said at the time. “She had seven children, ages 15 months to 10 years old, and they were all outside playing. She thought everyone was accounted for, moved the vehicle forward and discovered she’d run over the youngest.”

Singletary continued, “Medical personnel took over and tried to save the child, but they were unsuccessful. He was pronounced at the scene.”

Following Joshua’s death, Kim admitted that she struggled to cope with the tragedy.

In an essay on the family’s now-deleted website, the matriarch detailed her experience.

“I woke up every morning and functioned. But just barely. I wanted to die,” the matriarch wrote, per Woman’s Day. “My husband was dealing with losing his son and his wife. I was gone. Checked out. Unavailable for conversations or reality.”

“I thought of the accusations I would have thrown at Barry if the situation had been reversed,” she added of her ex-husband, with whom she announced her divorce from in June 2022. “He never did. He never even hinted at anything like that. He was strong. He just loved me.”

Kim also recalled the incident to producers during a season 2 episode, saying, “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.”

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Joshua’s sister Moriah — who was six at the time of his death — also shared that she has vivid memories of the accident.

“One of the things I struggle with to this day is … I was really close when he got run over,” Moriah recalled on season 4 episode “I’m Done Choosing” in 2022. “I watched it all happen, so sometimes I’ll still remember that like it was yesterday, like a flashback.”

“When I go to think of him, that’s the first thing I’ll think of, and so I thought that this would be really good for all of us … Just to remember the good in it and kind of reflect on that instead of what I always think of when I first think of him,” she added while at a family memorial in honor of what would’ve been his 15th birthday at the cemetery.