Family of Toddler Drowned at Hanahan Apartment Pool Recovers $6 Million

On the afternoon of May 18, 2018, a three-year-old boy was at an apartment complex in Hanahan, Berkeley County, with his aunt, grandmother, and two young cousins. The children were playing near a tennis court on the property. At some point they wandered beyond the sight of the adults. The boy's cousins ran to a neighbor who was grilling outside and told him their cousin had fallen into the pool. The neighbor jumped over the surrounding wall, pulled the toddler from the water, and began CPR. Emergency responders transported the child to a hospital. He did not survive.

His parents filed a wrongful death and premises-liability lawsuit against the company that operated the complex. Christopher McCool of Joye Law Firm in Charleston represented the family alongside David Yarborough and Christopher Bryant of Yarborough Applegate, also in Charleston.

The pool occupied a courtyard enclosed by a decorative brick wall. The masonry featured open spaces between the bricks, gaps wide enough for a young child to use as handholds and footholds. The wall was, in practical terms, a climbing structure rather than a barrier. A service gate that maintenance workers used to access the pool was ordinarily padlocked when not in active use, but it had never been fitted with a self-closing or self-latching mechanism. South Carolina law classifies apartment-complex pools as public pools and requires that all access gates carry self-closing, self-latching hardware as a baseline safety measure. Plaintiffs raised two additional code failures: the operator had not placed a commercial-grade cover over the pool even though it had been closed for more than six months before the incident (state regulations require such a cover in that situation), and the complex had no Certified Pool Operator on staff the day the child drowned.

The complex moved for summary judgment in federal district court in South Carolina. A judge denied that motion in February 2019. Testimony was contested on the specific condition of the padlock when the boy entered the pool area. The first officer on scene reportedly found the gate open; the operator's account differed. On the latching-hardware question there was no dispute: the gate lacked the self-closing and self-latching mechanism required by South Carolina law. The family's attorneys argued that hardware meeting state code would have kept the gate closed and impassable to a wandering toddler.

The case settled in July 2019 for $6 million, covering the family's wrongful death claim. South Carolina Lawyers Weekly ranked the result eighth among the top verdicts and settlements in South Carolina for 2019.