REPORT #3: DROWNING HAS STAYING POWER
By Doug Forbes
The Yates family, with baby Mary not pictured.
(Photo Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
On June 20, 2001, John, Luke, Paul, Noah and Mary Yates ranged in age from six months to seven years. They would never see another birthday, however, let alone another day. All five drowned in a bathtub within minutes of one another.
Their mother, Andrea, believed “they could never be saved.” She said to a Houston district attorney that if she did not kill them herself, Satan would.
A week shy of 17 years later, an 18-month-old towheaded girl named Emmy Miller drowned in a neighbor’s pool during a friendly get-together. Her father is acclaimed Olympic skier, Bode Miller. Her mother is professional volleyball player and model, Morgan Miller.
Neither of the Millers drowned Emmy, of course. They said their daughter “slipped away for just seconds.”
The Millers on the Today Show
Media coverage of the Yates and Miller incidents continues to this very day.
On the other hand, Samira and JJ Riggsbee, Jasper Ray St. Clair and Yori Tsunoda were never on the Today Show or subjects of headline news.
Nadina Riggsbee (Photo Carlos Avila Gonzalez, San Francisco Chronicle
Nadina Riggsbee gave birth to Samira in 1976. Her son, JJ, arrived one year later. And a year after that, both of them drowned in Riggsbee’s backyard pool, all because a babysitter neglected them for 15 minutes. Son JJ survived but never walked or talked again or breathed on his own. He is now 42 years old.
Jasper Ray’s babysitter also neglected him to death. The 2-year-old found his way into the babysitter’s backyard pool where he took his final breaths. Today, Jasper should be growing by leaps and bounds, tending to third grade studies.
Yori Tsunoda drowned in a backyard pool. But this time, no babysitter was involved. The 3-year-old disappeared under the water as Yori’s parents did what most parents do during summers, socialize at a friend’s house. It was Yori’s 6-year-old brother who told his dad that it looked like Yori was trying to see how long he could hold his breath.
Whether these drowning deaths and catastrophic injuries result from a rare intentional homicide or a common distraction, the impact remains the same — children suffer and history continues to repeat itself.
Bodies strewn about after the General Slocum disaster (Photo source unknown)
In fact, history reveals some very stark truths about America’s journey with drowning and the ways by which we choose to address its persistence.
In 1904, the General Slocum sidewheel passenger ship caught fire in East River, New York. The ship was not far from shore, but the women, most of whom apparently could not swim, believed that if they jumped overboard, they still might drown.
They were right. Approximately 1,000 women and children fatally submerged in one of the nation’s worst maritime disasters.
According to a New York Times article, “One of the lessons which the General Slocum horror should bring home to every woman and girl in New York City is the desirability of knowing how to swim.”
According to former Harvard archivist and historian, Marilyn Morgan, due to the impact of the Slocum disaster, cities coast-to-coast soon thereafter instituted “Learn to Swim’ programs that primarily targeted women.
Learn to Swim models have evolved over the last century.
Girls learning to swim (Illustrator unknown)
The American Red Cross has, for decades, offered an age and skills-based program delivered by authorized trainers at community facilities. On the other end of the spectrum, The New Science of Swimming Instruction affords remote instruction through videos and books.
More than a century after Slocum, males now represent 80% of drowning victims, largely due to over-confidence in swimming ability or consumption of alcohol, according to the CDC.
“I think this change is also based in culture,” said Dan Berzansky, owner of Premier Aquatic Services and board member of Stop Drowning Now, both in Orange County, CA.
“I’ve run a swim school for more than a decade. Latino men are not getting swim lessons. It’s nearly the same for African American men, although those who do are religious about ensuring their kids can also swim well.”
Berzansky said Stop Drowning Now has expanded the Learn to Swim model by instituting a program in which trained high school students volunteer to teach drowning prevention to public school children. “Every city should adopt this program,” he said.
Learning how to swim has still not evolved to a point where access and opportunities are equally afforded.
Although public swimming facilities emerged in droves during the early 20th century, according to a 2018 New York Times article, “White resistance to integrated swimming was rooted in a fear of interracial contact between men and women.”
Social justice advocates engaged in courageous acts to break barriers to access. They were, nonetheless, met with steadfast white resistance to the integration of public swimming facilities.
A series of Biloxi Beach, Mississippi, “wade-ins” from 1960-1963 drew droves of white protestors who severely beat black volunteers attempting to pave the way toward integration on Gulf Coast shores.
Prohibition also spanned to public and motel pools.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. helped protesters stage a famous swim-in at the Monson Motor Lodge in Florida. Motel manager, Jimmy Brock, dumped muriatic acid into the pool and around its protestors. After police understood that the acid not pose any danger, they jumped into the pool and made arrests.
1963 wade-in, Biloxi, Mississippi. (Photo Jim Bourdier, AP via David Cecelski)
Florida motel manager James Brock pours acid into his pool.
(Photo Horace Cort, 1964)
Over the ensuing decades, a combination of “white flight” and rising economic disparity greatly limited Black property ownership, let alone the construction of pools in their backyards.
According to the Times article, “From the 1970s to 1990s, cities faced with shrinking populations and rising budget deficits stopped building new pools or maintaining existing ones. Public pool attendance dropped.”
Today, Black children are 5-10 times more likely to drown in pools than their white counterparts, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.
Another study by the University of Memphis and the USA Swimming Foundation revealed that roughly 70% of Black people overall and 64% of Black children cannot swim.
The study also said that roughly 40% of white children, 58% of Latino or Hispanic children and 66% of Asian American children cannot swim well or at all.
But while access to swimming resources is limited for some, access overall is far from nominal.
The United States is brimming with more than 10 million residential swimming pools, 7.3 million hot tubs and 300,000 public swimming pools, not to mention countless fresh and saltwater options. California leads the nation with approximately 3 million pools.
This vast supply of water, combined with limited historical access for some and limited skills for many, certainly contribute to a steady diet of fatal and non-fatal submersions.
Texas State history professor and author James McWilliams wrote a 2017 article titled “The History of Drowning” in which he said, “By learning to swim a little, we may have learned to drown a lot.”
McWilliams quotes Harvard University evolutionary biology professor Daniel E. Lieberman who said, “It is possible that some of our ancestors swam or occasionally waded into marshes to collect sedges, but there is very little evidence that natural selection acted much on human abilities to swim.”
Families United to Prevent Drowning storybook
There is also very little evidence that the way adults have historically discussed childhood drowning has made a significant impact toward abatement.
According to its website, Families United to Prevent Drowning is “a group of people connected for the worst possible reason: the loss or near loss of someone we love to a water tragedy.”
The group said that the nation’s collective drowning prevention voice is “fragmented, siloed and often disjointed.”
“Parents do not understand the true risks,” said Adam Katchmarchi, executive director of the National Drowning Prevention Alliance. He said that FUPD was borne of families associated with the Alliance who wanted to exchange stories and resources.
“In my opinion, in the industry of drowning prevention, we need to balance what we know about drowning through data and research and stop making stuff up.”
Katchmarchi called himself a research nerd. In fact, his doctoral dissertation focused on drowning research. “We need a lot more evidence,” he said. “Groups refer to research by talking to other families. But to demand that we change an approach that has been used in the [aquatics] industry for the past 50 years based on anecdotal evidence is too far of an ask for me.”
FUPD has produced a flip book – available on its website – which includes 67 childhood drowning stories. Of the total, 56 caregivers who were nearby either did not pay attention or did not properly deploy barriers. The majority said they looked away for “seconds” or “moments,” while 25% said the child “slipped” away.
While it may take seconds for a child to evade caregivers, it takes more than seconds to suffer catastrophic drowning outcomes. The second report in this series addresses this process of phased drowning physiology.
Oxford defines “slip” as “to slide a short distance by accident so that you fall or nearly fall” or “to go somewhere quickly and quietly, especially without being noticed.”
Very young children are not sliding into bodies of water. They are choosing to immerse themselves. And they are drowning.
They may also move quietly away, but they do not necessarily do so with a strong sense of self-awareness.
On the other hand, children do what they do, which is to explore the world about them. If that immediate world contains a readily available body of water, including a bathtub or bucket left full of water, history proves that a child will make a beeline for that target.
Perhaps the use of vague or improper terminology somehow softens the blow. And perhaps some might lean on colloquialisms simply because they are top of mind.
But words matter.
Progress can be diluted by inaccurate language and epidemiological assessment. It’s doubly difficult to eliminate preventable outcomes without properly acknowledging if not describing them in the first place.
Dr. Chris Thurber is a UCLA and Harvard-trained psychologist and lifelong aquatics expert. He said, “How do we get there if we don’t acknowledge the magnitude of the responsibility? There’s no best or optimal message. But what is our social responsibility? For instance, what should you say if you’re at a public pool and something is amiss?”
Thurber said that we must also exercise discretion to avoid messaging that is unnecessarily heavy-handed or out of context.
He posited a scenario whereby a car salesman shows photos of drunk driving accidents before discussing the car’s price and features. Thurber said it’s understandable why it should not be part of that transaction, but compelling, persuasive education must be delivered at some appropriate point in time.
Media outlets address water safety before Memorial Day.
Media also often misses its messaging mark when conveying the persistence and gravity of preventable childhood drowning.
Each year as Memorial Day approaches, health and safety agencies or prevention advocates tap media outlets to deliver what have become rather rote water safety directives.
Within days of such efforts, however, child drowning reports pour in.
Journalists address the standard who-what-where-when in a few paragraphs, and that’s usually where the story ends — until the next one begins.
American Academy of Pediatrics spokesperson Dr. Ben Hoffman said, “It’s a real challenge with anything that has to do with death. Nobody wants to talk about kids dying. There’s guilt, there’s shame, there’s sorrow.”
As chair of AAP’s Council on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention, Hoffman said that public and private entities must work with media to deliver more nuanced reports that respect victims while also addressing the means by which critical gaps could have been bridged.
“If you’re comfortable doing it, and you have the message and the data and you can help the stories get out there, it changes people – they remember it.”
People especially remember widely and repeatedly reported celebrity drownings, including the drowning of the famous actress Natalie Wood 40 years ago or recent drownings of actress Naya Rivera, Emmy Miller or country music star Granger Smith’s 3-year-old son, River.
Smith’s wife Amber said in an Instagram post published by numerous media outlets, that the couple “lost” their youngest son and that they took solace knowing that “he is with his Heavenly Father.”
Amber Smith post about her son River who drowned
Reporters did not, however, ask Smith about how he said “somewhere between 30 seconds and three minutes” lapsed before he noticed River floating in the pool, let alone how his son had access.
Whereas anecdotal sound bytes about children disappearing in mere seconds can keep folks tuned in and advertisers satiated from the attention, candid and considerate discussions about accountability can potentially go a long way toward actually turning these same folks on to critical behavior change.
It remains unclear as to the merits of media markets covering drownings with cursory accounts regularly marked by the words “tragedy” and “loss.”
A toddler falls into a pool but no explanation of how he accessed the pool. A mother finds her 3-year-old girl in her pool and “no foul play was suspected.” A 4-year-old boy drowns in an above-ground pool during his birthday party but no discussion about the precipitous actions or systemic gaps that got him there. A non-swimmer is somehow allowed into a lake, unsupervised, and a teen friend drowns rescuing him, but media focuses on heroism, not negligence.
The challenge is how prevention advocates convince media partners to prioritize substantive health and safety urgency over socially shared sensationalism.
Caregivers do not conspire to maliciously neglect precious cargo, unless in rare instances such as Andrea Yates 20 years ago and Susan Smith before her. Smith said she was carjacked by a Black man who drove off with her 3-year-old and 14-month-old sons. She later admitted to drowning her sons in a lake.
Nonetheless, were parents to allow a toddler to dance atop a stove rife with boiling pots, amble onto a busy freeway or enjoy unfettered access to a loaded gun, chances are that media — and legal authorities — would exact a different response.
Derek Frechette (fourth from left), his wife Tina and two of their sons join former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in the signing of Christian’s Bill. Watch video for more.
Over the last few decades, more and more courageous souls have, in fact, promoted the idea that a pool is a gun loaded with water instead of bullets.
Following the double-drowning of her infant children, Nadina Riggsbee convinced medical directors in multiple California counties to track non-fatal drownings.
She subsequently founded the Drowning Prevention Foundation in 1985, the first organization of its kind.
And in 1998, Riggsbee spearheaded passage of the landmark California Swimming Pool Safety Act, legislation since mirrored across the U.S.
Nearly 20 years later, she was a guiding force for critical updates to the Act, which now requires multiple layers of protection around pools.
Nadina Riggsbee (Photo Jeannine Mendoza)
No other drowning prevention advocate has worked as long and as tirelessly as Riggsbee, now 82 years old.
“We need to save the babies from something that is preventable, that’s it. Most parents whose children have drowned tend to want to forget about it and move on. Drowning prevention is a full time job. I’ve done this for 40 years, and I didn’t get paid.”
In 2002, a 7-year-old girl named Virginia “Graeme” Baker was trapped by the 700-pound suction pressure of a backyard pool drain from which her mother, Nancy, could not extract her. Nancy watched her beloved daughter slowly die in her arms.
Graeme was the granddaughter of former Secretary of State James Baker. According to a 2007 ABC News report, “It took all the political clout of her distinguished father-in-law and five years of lobbying effort to overcome pool industry resistance.”
Nancy Baker (Photo Consumer Products Safety Commission)
The Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act was federally enacted in 2008.
Megan Ferraro is Executive Director of The ZAC Foundation, a water safety nonprofit established in 2008 by Karen and Brian Cohn after their 6-year-old son, Zachary, was trapped by a drain and drowned.
“The CPSC issues data annually and they report that no deaths due to drain entrapment have occurred at public pools or spas since VGB has been passed and adopted,” she said.
Ferraro said, however, there is no data collected or published on private, backyard pools. “Our job is never finished in the drowning prevention world.”
In 2007, Derek Frechette dropped off his two sons and their life jackets at a city-run day camp in Massachusetts. A camp operator said the life jackets were not allowed.
An hour later, 4-year-old Christian Frechette drowned in the lake.
Derek Frechette worked ceaselessly thereafter to mandate life jackets at municipal and recreational program facilities for children who are non-swimmers or at-risk swimmers.
With the help of a state senator whose brother also drowned at four years of age, Christian’s Law passed in 2012.
Dozens of such NGOs dot the drowning prevention landscape doing yeoman’s work that regulated government agencies either cannot afford to do or have the willpower to effectuate.
The increasing number of these entities and the collaborative initiatives that they engage are, on one hand, an encouraging sign that this preventable outcome is landing on more radar screens.
On the other hand, their mere existence signals just how pervasive and ceaseless the deadly outcome is.
NEXT UP
Read Report #4. Includes how parents, including those of Jasper Ray St. Clair and Yori Tsunoda, have channeled their grief into regional advocacy and how national NGOs approach drowning prevention. But with hundreds of initiatives simultaneously operating nationwide, drowning continues to receive financial and logistical short-shrift in the injury prevention arena. The reason for this nominal support might be anchored to whether drowning needs a better or bolder brand.