A woman and two children were in grave condition after an incident at a motel pool in the Hollywood area on Monday, Aug. 4, 2014. (Credit: KTLA)
Posted on 08/04/2014 8:00:52 PM PDT by BenLurkin
HOLLYWOOD (CBSLA.com) — Three people, including two children, are in critical condition after they were pulled from a motel pool in Hollywood.
Los Angeles City Fire Department personnel were called to the scene in the 5000 block of Hollywood Boulevard on Monday afternoon on a report of a drowning.
A fire department spokesperson says a man, a woman and four children were at the pool at the Hollywood Premiere motel when two of the children, a boy and girl ages 11 and 12, wandered into the deep end and the woman tried to help them.
A good Samaritan was able to pull the woman and children out of the water. Fire officials say the victims were in cardiac arrest when transported to a hospital.
Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division spoke to family members on the scene.
A witness told KCAL9/CBS2’s Serene Branson that the victims were related and the father of the children was present during the incident.
“I saw the paramedics trying to resuscitate a mother and her two children. … It was very sad, especially seeing the father. He was just going crazy and shouting and trying to go into the pool,” the man said.
The motel pool did not have a lifeguard present, although the pool is fenced in.
My parents taught me to swim by paying me one cent a lap. The trick, I found, was keeping your head out of the water so you could breathe. Back then you could buy a candy bar for ten cents.
Just yesterday one of my daughters pulled an elderly woman out of Lake Tahoe that didn’t know how to swim. The lady didn’t offer to pay for her Iphone that got soaked, of course. She was just embarrassed that she fell off the dock into the water and looked foolish.
Yeah, I was learning to swim about as soon as I could walk. I don’t understand how parents don’t bother with it, it is not an “optional” skill, like rollerblading or something.
I don’t know why they’d let the kids go in the pool if they can’t swim. I learned how to swim when I was a toddler.
Dad of the Year nominee.
Why was he trying to go into the pool if paramedics were trying to resuscitate the other three? That would mean the other three were out of the pool. Makes no sense he wanted to be in the pool.
This is a smelly story.
I taught swimming for years here in California. I told parents that not knowing how to swim in California is akin to not telling your kids to look before running across the street. It is just not an option.
My cousins grew up in So Cal. They were swimming around the same time they could walk. Their parents hired a private swimming coach like yourself.
While I was in the Army, we did a “water survival” course with the entire unit. The unit I was in was 50% blacks. We were first given a swim test where we jumped in wearing BDU’s, web gear, boots, and carrying a rubber M-16. We then had to swim the breadth of the pool.
It was shocking how many of the blacks couldn’t swim. Every single one of them were inner city folks. All of the southern rural ones could swim. Myself and 3 or 4 other young white guys spent the next hour swimming to the bottom of the deep end to retrieve the “M-16”
11 and 12 can’t swim? Sink like a stone in the “deep end”?
Let me guess.... the old stereotype.... are they Holder’s people??
Isn’t a lot of that state a desert?
Mother dropped us off at our neighborhood pool and said “They want to be on the swim team”. We became good swimmers, quick!
Having grown up in an urban environment I can tell you that there are swimming pools — but not many.
And they tend to not be very safe places. My folks made sure I learned how to swim — but to this day I’d always rather be fully dressed. Even if it means not going into the water.
What I can’t figure out is why people don’t know better than to go into the water after someone who is drowning — especially in a tiny pool like this one in Hollywood.
It’s just common sense — use the pole, and if there isn’t one use a towel.
It seems silly/awful I know, but I cannot disdain these people.
We went camping a couple of years ago, to a place were the big thing was “tubing” down the creek.
I am probably one of the most unathletic people you will ever meet. Me, I can sit inside and smoke cigarettes all day.
But hubby says, no, it’s easy, look 8 year olds are doing it. (Which they were.)
Well, it was fine for everyone else, but of course I got bollixed up and it took hubby, our friend, and daughter’s fiance to bring me back to shore.
No, I will never live it down, which is fine with me because it was terrifying.
Hubby was joking about it with a gal in a local shop up there. “Gee, my wife acted like she would drown in the creek!” “People have drowned in it” says the girl.
Which story he had the decency to share with me.
Never swim alone and never go in water you can’t handle, that is all I can say. This mom should have gotten the poles (which I’m hoping they had) and pulled the kids out, not gone in after them.
Glad you weren’t one of them!
I grew up near the beach in SoCal and spent a lot of time there. In the summer, a lot of black families would come to the beach.
As teenagers, we thought it funny how none of them would get in the water deeper than their knees. Of course it never occurred to us that they never had the opportunity to learn even the rudiments of staying safe in the water, or enjoying it.
Was not until many decades later I met a black lady scuba diving that was a natural in the water. She was from the Caribbean of course.
Yeah, me too!
I wonder if by “the pool” he meant the pool area, not the pool itself. Maybe the paramedics sort of cordoned off the area so they could do their resuscitation without people getting in the way, including the father.
Sounds like a crazy experience. What happened? Did you flip off the tube into the water and get disoriented or something?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.