Waterbury Jury Awards $7.2 Million to the Estate of a 5-Year-Old Who Drowned in a Boys & Girls Club Pool Watched by a Single Lifeguard

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 noticed and told her brother. He spent several minutes in the water trying to pull his sister out and could not. He finally went to the lifeguard for help, and she told him to tug the girl to the side of the pool. The lifeguard then lifted the child out, left her on the pool deck and went to find other staff. When club employees arrived there were, in the words of the family's lawyer, limited attempts at some CPR. Proper resuscitation of a drowning victim means rescue breaths followed by rapid chest compressions, about 100 a minute. No one compressed the girl's chest for 11 minutes, until paramedics arrived. At Saint Mary's Hospital in Waterbury she regained a pulse. She was flown to Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital, where she was pronounced brain dead the next day. Her mother took her off life support and donated her organs.

The mother, as administrator of the estate, sued the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Waterbury in September 2009 in Connecticut Superior Court in Waterbury. The complaint said the club let too many children into the pool at once, staffed it with a single, inadequately trained lifeguard, trained no one else for a water emergency, had no rescue plan, ignored recognized water-safety procedures and never warned the children of the danger. Kathleen Nastri and William Bloss of Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder tried the case.

The trial before Judge Terence Zemetis lasted two weeks in September 2014. The club argued that the girl had not drowned at all but had suffered a cardiac event in the water, pointing to a mitral valve prolapse noted by the medical examiner. Nastri answered that the condition is common and almost never causes a serious cardiac event in a healthy child. The club also argued that the mother was at fault for not telling staff that her daughter could not swim and had asthma; the mother testified that she had told them.

On September 18, 2014, after deliberating three and a half hours, the jury found the club responsible. It awarded the girl's estate $7.2 million: $3 million for her pain and suffering, $3 million for the loss of enjoyment of life's activities and $1.2 million for lost earning capacity. It awarded her mother $90,600 for medical and funeral expenses, and it awarded her brother $5 million for bystander emotional distress, which we list separately. The total came to roughly $12.3 million. Nastri said none of the things the club did wrong would have cost it money to do right, except hiring a second lifeguard: sitting in the lifeguard chair and knowing how to do CPR were free. The mother said she was grateful it was finally over and hoped it never happened to another family. The club's lawyers did not comment on the day of the verdict, and the club later said it intended to appeal.