Countless dirty diaper changes and daunting emotional and medical left turns did their best to wear me thin. But absolutely nothing, including my status as an older first-time father, could dissuade me from being all in on her remarkable expedition.

Some expeditions, however, terminate at the darkest of harbors. This one was named Summerkids, a decades-old outdoor recreational respite for children recently released from 10-month sentences in brick and mortar schools. And since my wife and I never attended camps as kids, we decided to endow our daughter with a slice of something new.

Little did we realize the fatal nature of an otherwise ordinary decision.

Roxie had taken a series of professional swimming lessons but was not water-safe. We used our own backyard pool to help her adopt a healthy respect for the water and to understand potential consequences when rules are abandoned. Nonetheless, anything can happen when others fail to share the same beliefs.

According to reports from the Los Angeles County Fire Department and Care Ambulance Service, Roxie was in full cardiac arrest and effectively dead when they arrived at the Summerkids pool.

Los Angeles County fireman and EMT specialist Stephen Weston said during a sworn deposition that the scene was “chaotic.” He said the volume of vomit that Roxie expelled was far beyond that which he had witnessed in more than a half dozen drowning rescues.

She had been in severe duress exponentially longer than the 30-60 seconds that Summerkids employees cited, Weston said.

Los Angeles County Deputy Elizabeth Cano was the first on scene. Like Weston, she said during sworn deposition testimony that Summerkids was in “chaos.” She said children remained on the pool deck watching the failed CPR attempt. She immediately demanded that the children be removed.

Los Angeles Homicide Bureau Detectives Steve Blagg and Scott Lawler interviewed the Summerkids employees who managed the pool the morning of the drowning: Hank Rainey, Natalie Del Castillo, Joseph Natalizio and Faith Porter.

According to the taped interviews, Rainey and Porter were assigned to the shallow end, Del Castillo the deep end and Natalizio the lifeguard chair where he could monitor the entire pool. All except Del Castillo said they neglected to pay attention to Roxie and other “non-swimmer” children for a period ranging from 30 seconds to five minutes. The children in their charge were six years old or younger.

The four employees said they were supposed to relegate non-swimmers to the very shallow steps area of the relatively small pool where these children could wade or playfully engage the water. However, Rainey said he extracted Roxie approximately 15-feet from that designated area in waters above her head.

None of the four employees said they saw Roxie drown. A staff member named Robert Antonucci said, in his taped interview, that he was 10-15 yards beyond the pool area when he saw Roxie floating face down. Antonucci said he immediately alerted the others.

The Summerkids employees assigned to the pool that fateful June morning said in taped interviews with sheriffs and in sworn deposition testimony that they were certified American Red Cross lifeguards. Summerkids owner-operator Cara DiMassa frequently promoted such certifications in a variety of communications.

DiMassa did not admit to any wrongdoing. She said the drowning was an “accident.” According to an email, DiMassa also instructed parents to not pick up their children early the day Roxie drowned. She said it was best to keep “the day as normal as possible.”

I received that email as I watched our effectively dead daughter being placed on a ventilator.

DiMassa kept the camp open that day and every day thereafter.

I knew in my marrow that something went terribly awry, especially since Roxie was always vigilant, never a rule-breaker and rarely a risk-taker without first securing multiple approvals. These communiques from DiMassa had me sideways.

Therefore, I approached this tragedy as a reporter, embarking upon the most personal investigative journey of my life — one which, to my utter horror, soon unearthed a scheme with a breadcrumb trail to my daughter’s preventable killing.

According to sworn testimony, Andrew Cervantes said Cara DiMassa and her father Joe DiMassa – a Summerkids co-owner – hired him in 2010 to train, test and certify employees as Red Cross lifeguards and water safety instructors.

However, according to Cervantes’ own Red Cross certificates, he was listed as both trainee and trainer. This meant he would have trained, tested and certified himself. According to a Red Cross representative on a phone call with me, The Red Cross prohibited this behavior and required a third party to train, test and certify its instructors.

Cervantes said that he had, in fact, certified himself and Summerkids employees as lifeguards and water safety instructors without requisite lifeguard training or any testing. According to emails and invoices, he did so at a greatly reduced cost and time investment.

Lifeguard training and testing require 26-28 hours. Swim schools and other training facilities typically charge fees that range from $250-$385 per student.

According to documents, Cervantes and the DiMassas afforded a maximum of six hours of instruction – including CPR, first aid, AED and lunch break – and no testing, at a cost of $120 per student.

Cervantes also administered all certifications, including his own, at the Summerkids facility or the DiMassa’s home pool. Red Cross instructors are required to administer training through either an Authorized American Red Cross Provider or a Licensed Training Provider. Summerkids is neither.

According to Summerkids emails, approximately 20 employees needed lifeguard, first aid, CPR and water safety instructor certifications or re-certifications each year over 10 years. That equates to hundreds of Summerkids employees who, under fraudulent circumstances, provided high-risk water safety supervision to children.

Nobody knows how many of these employees could even swim well.

Subsequent to admissions by Cervantes, Rainey and Del Castillo, I demanded that American Red Cross General Counsel Phyllis Harris revoke all certifications associated with Summerkids.

Harris complied within 12 days.

I further demanded that the Red Cross publicly own its culpability and change course.

Harris has not complied.

I was not at the camp when Roxie drowned. But I could have done more to prevent her from dying.

I could have and should have asked more questions before entrusting her to others. I could have demanded that she wear a life jacket if she wanted to be anywhere in the pool. I could have demanded to see the lifeguards in action before allowing her in the pool. I could have demanded to see lifeguard test results before considering the pool at all. I could have demanded to know what the camp’s insurance policy was. I could have asked about whether there were any prior injuries and the reasons why they occurred.

Summerkids disallowed parents on the grounds after the initial tour. That should have been enough of a red flag, despite their explanation that such prohibition was for security reasons.

The fact that the DiMassa family repeatedly lied about their aquatics programming and other operational matters only makes matters worse.

I might not ever have received the truth — until it was too late.

None of what I uncovered, however, will magically return my beloved daughter to me. She drowned due to willful negligence and fraud, according to dozens of deposition hours and hundreds of documents.

Roxie is in a bamboo box in my back closet, the lips I last kissed reduced to ash.

And, for at least a decade, the DiMassas also jeopardized thousands of other children, as young as three, by affording fraudulent lifeguarding services and water safety instruction.

Indeed, the cause of Roxie’s drowning resides at the very end of the negligence spectrum. But the act of rather normalized disregard is what ultimately binds these outcomes.

Every drowning, fatal or not, is formed from complex architecture. Wittingly or not, adults abdicate their responsibility and deflect their accountability. The question is, “Why?”

Parents will explain that they merely looked away from their drowned child for mere moments. First responders will file reports with nothing more than the basics. Water safety advocates will proffer the same parables rife with pleas for swim lessons, pool fences, life jackets, etcetera.

And the very next day, another child will be swallowed whole by a pool, river, lake, ocean, bathtub, toilet or watery ditch.

Run a general web search under “child drowning” or even a more specific search such as “YMCA drowning.” Prepare to scroll through entries ad infinitum. Also prepare to learn next to nothing about the “why” of it all — the critical epidemiology.

I am a journalist. I have poured over statistics, research papers, video, audio, panel discussions and personal interviews with gatekeepers from a wide range of public and private ventures. The common denominator among them all is that adults are at the helm of this sinking ship.

Yet, we adults consistently fail to admit that we are the ones who ran it into the reef.

According to a research study by the National Safe Kids Campaign, approximately 85% of children are being supervised by an adult when they drown.

We choose a bottle of rosé and chatter with friends over watching our children in pools. We choose our cell phones and laptops over watching our children in oceans. We choose household chores over watching our children in bathtubs.

We choose not to mandate water safety curriculum in our schools. We choose not to address this epidemic in pediatric well visits. We choose not to pass critical drowning prevention legislation in our capitals.

And we choose to subject a broad and deep community to interminable grief in the wake of a beloved little girl named Roxie or a beloved little boy named Jasper who can no longer spread pure, unadulterated joy.

Most importantly, we choose not to candidly discuss those choices as we unnecessarily bury one Roxie after another.

We will say to one another that there are no words to describe such a tragedy, or we can’t find the words.

That’s not good enough.

There are plenty of words. We must work harder to use them so that other parents and caregivers hear them loud and clear.

This five-part report will address words and choices. It will not deep-dive into any particular topic, but it will bridge experts from social sciences to data sciences, health services to safety services, aquatics arenas to political arenas. We will explore how the past continues to cast a long shadow over the present but also how the future might be fundamentally changed by a new coalescence of candor and collaboration.

And speaking of words, according to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, the English language is rife with roughly one million of them. According to me, only one of those words ever equated to the air I breathe.

That word is “daddy.”

When I now hear that word uttered by little ones in parks or stores or restaurants or even television commercials, agony courses through every square inch of my being. I cruelly wish that such a word failed to exist.

In the end, however, I realize there are three other words that should, in fact, actually exit our shared vernacular once and for all.

Preventable childhood drowning.

I made this video for Roxie’s fifth birthday. I was working on another for her sixth birthday but did not complete it before she died.