An eight-year-old girl has drowned at a Houston chain hotel after she was sucked into a pipe in the swimming pool.
The unnamed girl vanished Saturday while swimming at the DoubleTree by Hilton Houston Brookhollow on the city’s northwest side. When her parents could not find her, she was reported missing at 9:50 pm.
Tim Miller, the founder of Texas EquuSearch, said he and his team were called to the hotel and were puzzled about the circumstances surrounding the girl’s disappearance.
‘Did she wander off? Did somebody take her, or what? So, anyhow, we mobilized a lot of people. We had people actually searching outside and in different rooms and everything,’ Miller told ABC13 Houston.
According to police spokesman John Cannon, the Houston Fire Department inspected four pipes in the pool, each roughly a foot wide, but could not find anything.
An eight-year-old girl died after being sucked into a swimming pool pipe (pictured) at the DoubleTree by Hilton Houston Brookhollow
The girl was initially reported missing, but rescue teams reviewed security footage and determined that she had gone underwater and never resurfaced
Tim Miller, the founder of Texas EquuSearch, said rescuers found the little girl’s body ‘wedged’ deep inside the pipe after sending a camera 20 feet inside
Officers combed the hotel while Miller’s search and rescue nonprofit reviewed security footage alongside the Houston Police Department.
They discovered that the little girl had gone underwater and never resurfaced.
The pool was drained, and a small remote camera from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice was attached to a pole and sent nearly 20 feet inside the pipes.
Equipped with the camera and a scent tracking bloodhound, rescuers made the gruesome discovery around 11:30 pm.
The girl’s ‘little hand and part of her body’ were the first to appear, having been ‘wedged’ deep inside the pipe, Miller said.
He explained that the pipe had malfunctioned and was sucking water in rather than pumping it out.
Responders from the Houston Fire Department retrieved the girl’s body. The effort took around 13 hours.
‘Many of us had to wipe tears from our eyes,’ Miller said.
‘I never, ever thought in a million years it was going to end up as bad as it ended up…there is a grieving family out there, and it is going to be a long, painful healing process over this one.’
Houston’s homicide division will lead the investigation into the eight-year-old’s death, which is being probed as a drowning.
Officials have yet to disclose the girl’s identity pending an autopsy.
The Houston Fire Department retrieved the eight-year-old’s body after a 13-hour effort
According to Miller, the pipe had malfunctioned and was sucking water in rather than pushing it out
This is not the first time such an accident has happened.
In June 2007, six-year-old Abigail Taylor was playing in a public wading pool at Minneapolis Golf Club when she sat on a poorly maintained drain.
The sucking force ripped the little girl’s small intestine from her body.
Despite nine months of medical care including 16 surgeries and multiple organ transplants, Abigail died with her family by her side in March of the following year.
Most recently, in 2021, 10-year-old Danika Ross was sucked into an irrigation pipe inside a man-made pond at a Washington state winery.
According to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by her family, Danika was swimming with her siblings when she was pulled into the pipe, described as ‘not grated’ and ‘larger than necessary.’
Her body was ‘thrust down into a 90-degree bend’ and ‘transported nearly 70 feet up the hill via the mechanical pump mechanism.’
The Grant County Coroner determined that Danika died by asphyxiation from drowning and compression of the torso due to pressure in the pipe.
The trial was postponed after an appeal was filed in December 2022 and is slated to begin this year.