Rescue workers had to continue their work despite tears to recover the body of an 8-year-old girl who had disappeared without a trace the day before, after she was found in the faulty pipe of a hotel swimming pool in the Texas.
“She was stuck in there so, so tight. I don’t think she decided “I’m going to swim here and see what there is”. Many of us had to wipe away tears. “It’s one of the saddest cases we’ve seen in a long time,” said Tim Miller, the founder of Texas EquuSearch, a search and rescue organization called in on Sunday, according to the “New York Post.”
On Saturday, 8-year-old Aliyah Jaico was swimming in a long, lazy river-style pool at the DoubleTree hotel in Houston when her parents allegedly lost track of her, according to local television station KTRK-TV.
Initially believing in a kidnapping, searches were immediately set up to try to find the trace of the little girl.
“Did she move away? Did someone take her? Regardless, we mobilized a lot of people. We had people looking outside and in different rooms and everything,” the rescuer continued, according to the American media.
It was then that surveillance camera images would have shown the little girl immersing herself under the water of the swimming pool without ever resurfacing.
The rescuers’ fears were confirmed after draining the pool to pass a camera into one of the pipes, with a diameter of 30 to 40 centimeters according to local channel KPRC 2, where his body was found 13 hours later, after having been sucked 20 feet, according to Tim Miller.
“We saw his little hand and part of his body, so we had the firefighters come back to the scene,” he continued, according to the “NY Post”.
According to initial hypotheses, the pipe in question could have been poorly wired, so that it sucked water instead of expelling it, the rescuer continued.
For their part, the grieving family has reportedly filed a lawsuit for more than $1 million accusing the hotel and its parent companies of gross negligence for the wrongful death.
