Carelessness or crime? A hot summer day can blur the lines

When a Child Drowns, Who Is to Blame? Prosecutors Face a Growing Number of Hard Calls

Cybersecarmor.com – Every July and August, millions of American families head for swimming pools, lake shores, and ocean beaches to escape the worst of the summer heat. For parents of toddlers and preschoolers, that water represents both a welcome respite and a quiet, ever-present danger. What once seemed like a steadily shrinking public-health problem has, in recent years, turned sharply back toward catastrophe — and with it, a wave of criminal prosecutions that leaves grieving families wondering whether their loss will be treated as tragedy or as a crime scene.

A Statistic That Reversed Course

For decades, drowning deaths among American children fell year after year, a quiet victory of pool fencing, life jackets, and public-safety campaigns. That downward trend broke after 2019. A report published in June by the American Academy of Pediatrics documented a significant uptick in pediatric drowning mortality, making it the leading cause of unintentional death for children aged one through four and the second-most-common killer of kids between five and fourteen.

Dr. Rohit Shenoi, the report’s lead author, emphasized how little time separates a child from disaster.

“Drowning can occur within seconds. It’s very, very fast.”

The report noted that toddlers and young children most frequently drown in residential swimming pools, often in their own backyards. Inadequate adult supervision near water remains one of the single largest risk factors identified in pediatric drowning literature.

From Tragedy to Indictment

Most drownings each year are treated as accidents. Hundreds of children die annually in water-related incidents, yet criminal charges against parents, grandparents, or other caregivers remain comparatively rare. Frank Vandervort, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and co-founder of the Juvenile Justice Clinic, explained that when prosecutors do move, the charges can span a wide spectrum — from child endangerment and neglect to abuse, and in extreme circumstances, manslaughter.

“Abuse is a little harder to prove. Usually most states, their criminal child abuse laws have sort of an active component, right? You have to intentionally do something.”

Still, 2026 has already produced a string of prosecutions across the country. Adults in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, and Florida have been charged or convicted in connection with child drownings, signaling that prosecutors nationwide are scrutinizing supervision failures more closely than in prior years.

A Georgia Grandmother’s Charge

The most recent example arrived on July 15, when Emelisa Paz-Santos, 44, was booked into the Fulton County jail on charges of involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children in the second degree. Her two-year-old grandson had drowned at a pool attached to an apartment complex. The arrest warrant stated that she “failed to provide adequate supervision” for the child while he was at the pool. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

“The Evidence Has to Be Really, Really Strong”

Ramin Fatehi, the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Norfolk, Virginia, has spent his career weighing exactly this question. He described the decision to charge a parent after a child’s death as “always inherently difficult.”

“When we’re dealing with parents, children and accidents, the evidence has to be really, really strong for me to say I am going to take this grieving parent — presuming that the parent is grieving — and turn the parent into a criminal.”

In July 2025, a two-year-old boy drowned in a backyard swimming pool in Norfolk. His mother had been passed out from drinking at the time of the incident. Fatehi initially considered filing felony murder charges but ultimately charged Tiffany Smith with felony child neglect — the first drowning-related prosecution of its kind since he assumed office in 2022. After Smith pleaded guilty, Fatehi asked a judge to impose a prison term exceeding four years. At an emotionally charged hearing, with supporters filling the courtroom on both sides, the judge sentenced Smith to two years.

“There is a difference between a parent who has a momentary lapse of supervision and something tragic happens, and a parent engaging in such reckless behavior, that is that it leads to the harm or the death of their child.”

The Arizona Example: Negligence, Not Intent

Two cases from Arizona illustrate how granular the factual inquiry becomes. In one, Gilbert police arrested and recommended criminal charges against the parents of an eighteen-month-old boy found floating face-down in the family’s backyard pool. A police report alleged the parents were criminally negligent because they failed to supervise the child, allowing him to wander from the garage into the backyard and into the water. The case underscored how prosecutors must reconstruct, minute by minute, exactly where a toddler was and who was watching at each interval.

What Families and Communities Should Understand

The legal landscape is shifting. Where a decade ago a child’s drowning was almost universally classified as an accident, today’s prosecutors are more willing to examine whether a caregiver’s conduct crossed the line from ordinary negligence into gross negligence or recklessness. Vandervort noted that prosecutors in these cases are typically looking for “acts of gross negligence” rather than simple inattention.

For parents and caregivers, the practical implications are straightforward: constant, active supervision near any body of water — pool, bathtub, lake, or even a large kiddie pool — remains the single most effective safeguard. Pool fencing, self-closing gates, and removing toys from the water area when children are not swimming all reduce the window of opportunity for a toddler to reach water unsupervised.

For the broader community, the rising prosecution rate raises questions about proportionality, family privacy, and the line between a tragic lapse and criminal culpability. Courts will continue to draw that line case by case, but the direction of travel is clear: the era in which a child’s drowning was treated as purely a medical event, with no legal consequence for the adults present, is narrowing.