“It’s the best place to get snakes,” Fall River City Councilwoman Patricia Casey says about the lure of the Quality Concrete plant near Cook Pond.

Turtles, snakes, open gates, giant blocks and piles of sand and stone sorted by size seem to beckon boys.

Two have died from falling into hoppers and churned toward an underground conveyor belt.

Eric Martins, 12, died in 1997 after trying to rescue an 11-year-old friend who fell into a hopper while climbing on a sand ridge. They rode their bikes through the plant’s open gates.

Codey Duclos, 9, died in 2007. He, too, was climbing on a sand pile and fell into a hopper.

“He drowned in sand,” Councilwoman Casey said Friday. “It sucked him right in.”

Casey said the second death could have been prevented. After Eric Martins died, “I just took it for granted that they were going to fix it,” said Casey. “I never did check it.”

She wasn’t a councilwoman in 1997, but in 2007, after Codey died, she visited the plant often, sometimes every day, to see that measures were being taken. “I saw the poles going up, more lighting, cameras would be hooked up to the computer” so an operator could see, before activating the hopper, that no children were near. Signs were posted. A siren was installed to warn that the hopper was about to be activated.

She wanted to make sure a grate was installed to keep children from falling through the hopper, she said, but she was thrown off the property.

“They didn’t have to drag me out,” she said. “They just told to leave.”

She started watching from Kilburn Street.

On Thursday, a Bristol County grand jury indicted the company’s owner, Scott J. Douglass, 48, of Rehoboth, on one count of manslaughter in the 2007 death of Codey Duclos.

Douglass owns a related business in Tiverton, Construction Materials Corp. at 810 Fish Rd., the same address as Douglass Brothers Inc.

Calls to the Fall River plant were referred to the Tiverton office. A woman who answered at the Tiverton office said she was in charge and didn’t know anything about it. Calls to the Douglass residences were not answered.

Donna Medeiros has lived next to the Fall River plant for 30 years. When her three boys were growing up, she said Friday, there wasn’t even a fence. “We tried to keep them out of there” by warning them.

Her husband, she said, helped in the 1997 rescue of Eric Martins and Kyle M. DeMello, 11, who survived. Martins died two days later.

On the day Codey Duclos fell in, Medeiros said, his brother came to her house for help. He needed a drink of water, she said, and to use the bathroom. He said he and his brother had been looking for snakes.

“Kids can still get in there,” Medeiros said Friday. Now, when she sees children going through the fence or playing on the sand piles, she tells them to go away.

“I’d rather scare the dickens out of them than have another one die.”

She has empathy for the plant owner. “He’s just trying to make his living,” she said. “But you’ve also got to realize there’s kids around here.”

An arraignment date for Douglass has not been scheduled.

dnaylor@projo.com