Every parent’s nightmare is losing a child. The grief and anguish are something that some people never recover from. It doesn’t matter the situation, whether it be health related, an accident or god forbid foul play.
Recently, an Oklahoma family had the worst possible thing happen, as two toddlers left unattended for only a few minutes found their way outside and both met a terrible fate. Check this out.
An Oklahoma family is grieving after their 18-month-old twins drowned in a backyard swimming pool.
Their mother, Jenny Callazzo, said she discovered siblings Locklyn and Loreli Callazzo in the water on the morning of March 16, according to Oklahoma City Fire battalion chief Scott Douglas. He said that when first responders arrived on the scene, they found Locklyn and his sister Loreli on the ground, and immediately began patient care. The children’s hearts had stopped beating, he said, and they did not have a pulse.
Twin toddlers drown in swimming pool at family home in Oklahoma. https://t.co/KWnAtM5VZv
— Dr. Jeffrey Guterman (@JeffreyGuterman) March 17, 2023
Sometimes children can be pulled from situations like this and survive unscathed, as kids tend to have more resilient metabolisms in terms of oxygen deprivation. Despite the paramedics best efforts, that did not prove to be true here.
“The mother explained she was homeschooling an older child while the younger children were playing in the living room,” Douglas tells TODAY.com. “The grandmother left the back door open, leaving an exit to the swimming pool. The mother stated the longest they could have been in the swimming pool was ten minutes. ”
Locklyn and Loreli were transported to an area hospital where they were pronounced dead.
It has been reported that the grandmother in the family is mentally compromised, which led her to inadvertently leave the door open.
However, the entire situation could have been avoided if the family had been following an Oklahoma law regarding backyard swimming pools.
According to Douglas, the Callazzos did not have a pool fence and there was “open access.” Douglas says he could not say if there was an alarm on the back door leading out to the pool.
In the state of Oklahoma, residential swimming pools must be surrounded by a fence that has minimum height of 4 feet, or 48 inches. The law also requires them to have self-closing safety gates.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that every home pool be surrounded by a fence to prevent a child from unsupervised access from the house. The group warns that “there is no substitute for at least a four-foot-high, nonclimbable, four-sided fence with a self-closing, self-latching gate.”
It is unclear if there are going to be any charges filed, or if the parents even knew that was a law. Regardless, it is a tragedy that could have been avoided by a fence, alarm or self locking gate.
It is hard to imagine a grief more deep, and also hard to feel like charges were justified if they are in fact filed. Either way, lives were lost and changed forever, and hopefully people will take note and secure their homes, so something like this never happens again.
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