Jury Awards $5 Million to a 7-Year-Old Who Tried and Failed to Pull His Drowning Sister From a Boys & Girls Club Pool

At about 4 p.m. on June 9, 2008, roughly 30 young children in an after-school program at the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Waterbury, Connecticut, got into the club's indoor pool for a free swim. One lifeguard was on duty: a 20-year-old who was Red Cross certified and had worked at the club for six months. She was not in the elevated lifeguard chair. She was sitting in a low plastic chair on the deck doing paperwork, wearing capri pants rather than a swimsuit.

Among the children were a 5-year-old girl, a kindergartner who stood under four feet tall and could not swim, and her 7-year-old brother. Their mother had registered both of them for the program in late May and testified that she told club staff that neither child knew how to swim. Nonswimmers had been told to stay in the shallow end. The girl slipped underwater anyway.

Another child in the water noticed and told the brother. For several minutes the 7-year-old tried on his own to haul his sister up and out. He could not. He went to the lifeguard for help, and she told him to tug the girl to the side of the pool rather than entering the water herself. The lifeguard then lifted the child out, left her on the deck and went to find other staff. Club employees made what the family's lawyer called limited attempts at some CPR, and no one performed chest compressions for 11 minutes, until paramedics arrived. The girl regained a pulse at Saint Mary's Hospital in Waterbury, was flown to Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital and was pronounced brain dead the next day.

Connecticut recognizes a claim for bystander emotional distress when a close relative witnesses a fatal injury as it happens. The boy's claim was brought alongside his sister's wrongful death case against the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Waterbury in Connecticut Superior Court in Waterbury, filed in September 2009 by the children's mother. The suit alleged that the club put too many children in the pool, supplied one inadequately trained lifeguard, trained no one else for a water emergency, had no rescue plan and ignored recognized water-safety procedures. Kathleen Nastri and William Bloss of Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder tried the case.

The two-week trial before Judge Terence Zemetis in September 2014 turned on causation and blame. The club contended the girl had a cardiac event in the water rather than drowning, citing a mitral valve prolapse noted by the medical examiner, and that the children's mother was negligent for not telling staff her daughter could not swim. The mother testified that she had told them, and Nastri argued that a heart murmur common in healthy children was not what killed a nonswimmer who went under in a pool with no one watching.

On September 18, 2014, after three and a half hours of deliberation, the jury found the club responsible and awarded the boy $5 million for the emotional distress of watching his sister drown and being unable to save her. The same verdict gave the girl's estate $7.2 million and their mother $90,600 in medical and funeral expenses, for a total of roughly $12.3 million. Nastri said the boy, who had been in the pool trying to get his sister out, still believed he was somehow at fault, and had really, really suffered for it; she said the jury's finding that the club, not he, was responsible had helped him understand that. The club said afterward that it had changed its safety practices and planned to appeal.