An 8-year-old girl was sucked into a “malfunctioning” pipe in a hotel pool in Texas over the weekend and found dead in the tube more than half a day later, authorities said.
The tragic disaster happened at a Houston DoubleTree as little Aliyah Jaico swam with her family in the “lazy river style” pool Saturday, cops said.
Aliyah was reported missing at first, according to KTRK-TV.
“Did she wander off? Did somebody take her or what? So anyhow, we mobilized a lot of people,” said Tim Miller, the founder of Texas EquuSearch, which was called in to help try to find the child. “We had people actually searching outside and in different rooms and everything.”
The search team initially thought she may have been abducted from the hotel.
Security footage of the pool later revealed that the child had gone underwater and never resurfaced.
Aliyah’s body was found after the pool was drained and a camera was sent into one of its pipes, the outlet said.
“We put them poles in there almost 20 feet, and we saw her little hand and part of her body, so we got the fire department back out there,” Miller said.
“[It] appears right now the pump was put in there, and it was probably malfunctioning because of the open pipe that she ended up in was supposed to be pushing water out,” he said.
“And right beside that pipe, there was another pipe that actually had a big plastic filter like screen on the front that’s supposed to be sucking water in. So I know there was one speculation last night from somebody that knows quite a bit and everything that that the pump was wired wrong. So it was sucking instead of pushing.
“She was wedged in there so very, very tight,” Miller said. “I don’t think she decided, ‘I am going to swim in here and see what’s here.’
“Many of us had to wipe tears from our eyes,” he said of the search team. “This is one of the saddest ones we’ve seen in a good while.”
The effort to find the girl and recover her body took about 13 hours.
Aliyah’s family has since filed a wrongful death suit against the hotel and its parent companies, accusing the parties of gross negligence that led to the child’s death, KPRC 2 reported.
The family is seeking more than $1 million in damages.
The startling incident is not the first time a child had been killed by a pool. In 2006, Abigail Taylor, 6, died after the suction of a pool drain at a Minnesota golf club ripped out part of her intestinal tract, according to NBC News.
The next year, Zachary Cohn, 6, the son of a Connecticut millionaire, died after his arm was sucked into a drainpipe that may have been missing a safety grate at his family’s pool.
His parents Karen and Brian Cohn started the ZAC Foundation to advance water safety in his memory.
