I must confess, this story is so far out that I catch myself checking and re-checking that I’m not reading The Onion or something like that. The Haitian woman who was found floating in a public Fall River pool on Tuesday, apparently did drown in the pool on Sunday, with a boy noticing her going under, life guards being alerted, the people accompanying her knowing that she was missing, and health inspectors checking the pool on Monday and Tuesday.
Let’s patch together few horrid sentences from this Raw Story and Charter.net:
A 9-year-old boy that went down the slide just before Joseph tried to alert lifeguards but was ignored, according to Veronica Reis, a friend of the victim.
“The little boy was trying to pull her back up, but he couldn’t,” she said, according to the Globe. “She was too heavy, and she was too slippery from the water.”
“He got up to the water and went to go tell the lifeguard,” said Reis, who talked the 9-year-old afterward. “The lifeguard said he was going to do a pool check. … They never did that. They never did anything.”
Joseph had gone to Veterans Memorial Pool on Sunday with a group of friends.
Authorities said she had not been reported missing. Her friends said they thought she simply walked away from the pool. Her boyfriend’s calls went unreturned, but he thought she wanted to be alone.
Joseph, who worked as a housekeeper, slid into a side of the pool that is 12 feet (3.7 meters) deep.
“The facts appear to indicate that a woman was in the water for a number of days and not noticed by staff, patrons or other inspections that may have taken place”
Two health inspectors visited the pool on Monday, and one of them returned Tuesday, Mayor Flanagan said Thursday.
“The only noteworthy thing in the report listed the clarity (of the water) as cloudy,” Flanagan said.
Tasha Stokes, 28, said she visited the pool on Monday and noticed that the deep end of the pool was white and closed to swimmers.
“It was white. We went swimming in that water. There were little kids drinking that water,” said Stokes. “I’m shocked. I was swimming in water with a dead person. I think I have a lawsuit on my hands.”
The water may have become murky because the body had begun to decompose.
And then, read this, out of boston.com.
The mother of the 9-year-old who reportedly tried to alert two lifeguards separately about the apparent drowning of Marie Joseph at a state-run pool here Sunday said in an interview yesterday that her son is despondent and keeps saying he wishes he were bigger so he could have saved the woman.
“He’s sad because he saw the last moments of Marie’s life, and when he tried to do something, nobody listened,’’ said Danyelle Hunt, 30, standing in the parking lot of her apartment complex, about 2 miles from the pool.
I think that someone is going to jail, if this is true.
