The death of a 14-month-old child, who drowned in East End four years ago, has been ruled as an act of misadventure.
The Coroner’s Court heard that the body of Celestina Vassel was found on 4 Jan. 2019 by a relative along the shoreline of Gun Bay, East End, covered in sargassum seaweed, with no obvious signs of life.
“When I got on the scene, I saw a young man walking, crying and looking distressed,” emergency medical technician Kendal Connor told the court at a hearing on Friday, 20 Oct. “When I got to the beach, I saw the father holding his daughter, screaming for someone to help his child.”
Connor, who is from East End and knows the family, told the court that he took the child from her father, and began administering lifesaving intervention measures.
“From her state, it was clear that she was in the water for some time, so it was not safe to administer any defibrillation in that area,” said Connor. “Instead, I began administering CPR and injected other drugs to help bring her back, before the ambulance arrived.”
The court heard that, between East End to the Cayman Islands Hospital in George Town, various life-saving measures had been administered every five minutes; however, upon arrival, no progress had been made and the attending doctor pronounced the child dead.
The jury was told of the activities in the child’s home in the hours leading up to her death. Her mother had arrived home from work, following a long shift as a dish washer at a hotel, and gave the little girl an electronic tablet to watch, before taking a rest ahead of her second shift for the day.
The child’s father, who was unemployed at the time, was fixing a car with his 18-year-old son, who was visiting from Jamaica.
“Initially, we received a report of a missing child,” said RCIPS Detective Inspector Collins Oremule told the court.
“When I arrived on the scene, the child’s father was frantic, and so I tried to calm him down, so we could figure out where the child might have gone,” he added.
According to Oremule, the little girl’s body was found along the shoreline between 500 and 900 feet away from her home, after she had walked through a narrow path of shrubs and bush.
In her witness statement, the child’s mother said, although her daughter was only 14 months old, she was very adventurous, curious and loved to play with the dogs in the yard; and although she could not speak, she was a quick walker.
“When I saw the mother, she was devastated and crying, saying, “I can’t believe they made my baby drown”, said Oremule.
Initially, police had been contemplating charges of neglect, the court heard. Oremule said the matter had been transferred to the Family Support Unit, with no further developments.
“I know that, in these times, it is normal to think of blame, but what the family needed was support, and that’s what we gave them,” he said. “No one should ever feel the pain of losing a child, and if they do, what they need the most during those times is support.”
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