DEFIANCE, Ohio -
Four drowning deaths in just over a week in Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan have focused concern on water safety. Last week, two-year-old Frasier Burt drowned in a family pool in Oregon. Last Wednesday, a 19-year-old and a 20-year-old both drowned in separate incidents.
The most recent case happened Sunday near Defiance, where family members found three-year-old Jayden Mitchell unresponsive in a pool.
The Defiance County Sheriff's Department calls Jayden's death a tragic, accidental drowning. However, his family members say they feel guilty, playing the incident over and over in their minds.
The three-year-old managed to slip away from them during a cook-out and somehow got over the closed gate around the swimming pool.
The boy's great grandmother, Hilda Schroeder, and the family have already drained and tore down the family pool after the tragedy this weekend.
"We decided we just can't have it here," Hilda says. "It's too sad a memory."
Jayden, who was about to turn four years old, loved swimming in the pool with his cousins.
That's what he was doing Sunday during a family get-together at great-grandma's house on Coy Road in Delaware Township.
"He had been wearing a life jacket all day, and we just took it off because we just got out of the water, and we were going to eat," Hilda says.
She says the gate to the pool deck was closed. She went inside the home to get dinner ready and heard Jayden's mom looking for her son.
Somebody spotted the boy in the pool, and the mother jumped in after him. As she pulled Jayden from the water, Hilda called 9-1-1 and then performed CPR on the deck until emergency crews arrived.
According to the police report, family members told responding officers Jayden was likely underwater for several minutes before getting spotted and pulled out by his mom.
The Defiance County Sheriff's Department and Jayden's family are calling the little boy's drowning a tragic accident.
"He was a very loving little boy," says Hilda. "Just that day he had jumped on a raft with me and crawled up to me and gave me a kiss on the cheek, and the last conversation we had was he says, 'I love you grandma,' and I said, 'I love you too, buddy.'"
Hilda has 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She hopes other families with pools in their backyard will see what happened to her family and prevent a similar incident from happening to their kids.
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