A three-year-old boy is lucky to be alive after the unattended child stepped into a hot tub at a Florida beach resort and slipped underwater before being pulled out not breathing and without a pulse, police say.
According to Daytona Beach Shores Police, a 36-year-old mother has been charged with several offences, including felony child neglect, after her child nearly drowned at Perry’s Ocean Edge Resort in Daytona Beach on Sunday night.
Resort security footage shows a set of twin children, one wearing water wings, step into the hot tub as other resort guests mill about in the water as well, not noticing the child go under.
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WESH News obtained a 911 call from an employee who saw the toddler slip into the water.
“We caught something on the camera and we came running,” a maintenance worker said.
According to NBC, the child was underwater for over two minutes before being pulled out without vital signs.
Video shows a maintenance worker pulling the child out of the hot tub and immediately beginning to perform CPR.
“We got him to breathing, we got him breathing, but barely,” an employee said in a 911 call.
According to an incident report, the father of the children had left the kids in the care of their mother while he went to pack up their belongings from the pool area. The mother was sitting a table away from the hot tub when her children went in.
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“It was pretty obvious she was highly intoxicated and she wasn’t watching and one of the children slipped into the hot tub and went under immediately,” police chief Stephan Dembinsky told NBC News. “This is a three-year-old child that can’t look out for themselves, these are parents with twins and somebody should have been watching that child at all times.”
Officers said the woman was also seen on security footage tossing something into the garbage while her child was receiving CPR. Investigators said they found a pill in the trash that the mother admitted to tossing out.
Authorities said the mother, Apryl Connolly, later admitted to consuming alcohol, marijuana, oxycodone and suboxone prior to the incident. She was charged with felony child neglect and destruction of evidence.
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