Police said, when the searchers found the girl in one of the pipes, HFD was called back out to the scene to recover her body.
HOUSTON — Houston police said an 8-year-old girl was found dead inside a pipe in a hotel pool late Saturday night near Highway 290.
It happened at a DoubleTree hotel near Pinemont Drive and Highway 290.
Police said they responded around 5:45 p.m. to a missing person call. Officials said the girl, now identified as Aliyah Jaico, was swimming with other family members in a lazy river-style swimming pool at the hotel when she went missing.
Houston police said officers could not find Aliyah so they called for assistance from several agencies, including Texas EquuSearch and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice since they have a bloodhound and a long pole with a camera to help search. That is how she was found in the pipe.
Police said when the searchers found Aliyah in one of the pipes, the Houston Fire Department was called back out to the scene to recover her body. Paramedics pronounced her dead.
The medical examiner’s office determined Aliyah drowned.
Lawyers for Aliyah’s family told KHOU 11 News they have filed a lawsuit in Harris County Civil Court on their behalf.
On Monday, the Houston Health Department released a new inspection of the pool, which reported multiple violations including a ladder with missing treads.
The report also included 32-inch channel drains on the walls of the pool with no valid documentation and a variety of issues with doors and gates at the pool.
The pool is closed until further notice and will need to be reinspected.
“Entrapments are really what we call them, these incidents are extremely rare,” said Adam Katchmarchi with the National Drowning Prevention Alliance.
In 2007, congress passed the Virginia Graeme Baker Act, which requires commercial pools to cover their drains.
Still, drowning prevention advocates say children need to be told to steer clear.
“Even though operationally these types of incidents should not occur, accidents can happen so just making sure kids stay away from any drains,” Katchmarchi said.
KHOU 11 News has reached out to the parent company of the hotel for comment.
Eight-year-old girl found dead in hotel pool’s pipe
Warning: This article contains content which some readers may find distressing.
An eight-year-old has died after apparently being sucked into a pipe whilst swimming in a hotel pool.
The little girl was spending time in the pool at DoubleTree by Hilton Houston Brookhollow in Houston, Texas, when she vanished on Saturday (23 March).
She was reported missing at 6:00pm when her parents couldn’t find her anywhere.
Founder of Texas EquuSearch, Tim Miller, said that his team and him were called to the city’s hotel and were baffled by the circumstances around the youngster’s disappearance.
He explained to ABC13 Houston: “Did she wander off? Did somebody take her, or what?
“So, anyhow, we mobilised a lot of people. We had people actually searching outside and in different rooms and everything.”
ABC13 Houston
As officers searched through the hotel, the Houston Police Department, along with Miller’s search and rescue non-profit team, reviewed security footage.
The footage showed that the girl had disappeared underwater and never came back to the surface.
The Houston Fire Department told LADbible that the team did not find anything upon their initial search of the four large pipes in the lazy river pool at the hotel.
The swimming pool was drained out and a small remote camera was attached onto a pole and sent nearly 20 feet inside.
At about 11:30pm, rescuers made the tragic discovery using the camera and a scent-tracking dog.
Miller said that the girl’s ‘little hand part of her body’ appeared first and it seemed she had been ‘wedged’ deep inside the pipe.
He added that she was in there ‘so very, very tight’ that he doesn’t think she decided to ‘swim in here and see what’s here’.
ABC13 Houston
Miller claims that the swimming pool’s pipe had malfunctioned and instead of pumping out water, it was sucking it in.
It was a long 13-hour process but responders from the Houston Fire Department were eventually able to retrieve the little girl’s body.
“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.”
The child’s tragic death is being investigated by Houston’s homicide division and it is being probed as a drowning.
Miller added that it was ‘one of the saddest ones we’ve seen in a good while’.
Hilton Hotels & Resorts declined to comment to ABC13 but did tell them that the pool is temporarily closed.
LADbible has contacted the Houston Police Department and Hilton Hotels & Resorts for comment.
