One instant without supervision was all it took for Casey McGovern’s daughter to die.
She still remembers the series of events down to the minute, nearly 17 years later: Checking out at Publix on an August afternoon; driving back to her Coral Springs home; setting 19-month-old Edna Mae — or Em, as the family calls her — in front of the TV with a snack. She began putting the groceries away, then went briefly into the living room to answer a question from her husband. When she returned, her daughter wasn’t there, so she started looking for the toddler around the house.
McGovern didn’t think to check the family’s pool first. She didn’t know back then just how deadly a pool could be, or that Em might be in it. But when she stepped outside after searching the other rooms of the house, she saw her daughter floating in the water and screamed. Her husband ran outside and started CPR. Then the paramedics arrived.
The Publix receipt was timestamped 3:46 p.m. By 4:15 p.m., McGovern and her husband, Shannon, were in the hospital. Em never regained consciousness and died a week later.
“It was 29 minutes from checking out with groceries for a family of five to watching my daughter fight for her life,” McGovern said.
Child drownings have long been a tragic reality in Florida, but the crisis has reached unprecedented levels. Florida is now hurtling toward its deadliest year on record, driven by a tide of summer tragedies that safety advocates are struggling to halt.
As of mid-July, 74 children have drowned in Florida this year — a distressing trajectory coming off 2025’s record-high total of 120 fatalities. July alone has had 11 deaths thus far. And in South Florida, six children have died since mid-June, while pediatric trauma centers report treating near-fatal drownings on almost a weekly basis.
Drowning has now cemented itself as the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4 in Florida and the entire U.S., surpassing all other causes, both accidental and intentional. Florida leads the nation in child drowning deaths.
The unrelenting crisis this year comes despite decades of public education campaigns and localized prevention efforts. Now, grief-weary advocates and medical professionals are left grappling with a daunting question: Why — in a state hyper-aware of water safety — do young lives continue to slip away? And, what will it take to finally curb this devastating trend?
It was 2009 when Em died. McGovern, who later helmed the Department of Health’s Drowning Prevention Program in Broward County, now knows that having a pool in the backyard with no child safety measures in place — such as a pool fence, door alarms, survival swim lessons and knowledge of CPR — is akin to keeping a loaded gun on the table. But many other parents don’t.
McGovern still replays the image of her daughter’s wide-open blue eyes when she found her floating, unconscious, in the pool. She keeps Em’s ashes on a shelf in the dining room. It probably isn’t “appropriate,” she said, but “we haven’t done anything with her ashes because I felt that she needed to be with us.”
For decades, parents like McGovern have lived with overwhelming grief and regret. Several have tried to cope by throwing themselves into advocacy work in hopes of sparing other families. They’ve taken to social media, launched foundations to expand access to swimming lessons for young children, pushed for state laws requiring every home with a pool to install a pool fence, and handed out informational posters at dentists’ and doctors’ offices.
But over those same years, the number of child drownings has only risen, frustrating those advocating in the wake of their children’s deaths.
“I think that I have a very hard time having a work-life balance because I feel like I’m against the grain, like just trying really hard to create change and it’s not working,” McGovern said.
Part of their frustration comes from knowing that most drownings are preventable. The problem is that many parents are not aware of the risks and do not adhere to key layers of protection: adequate supervision of children, especially around water; alarms on the doors to alert parents if a child slips out of the house; a pool fence, with a self-latching and locking door; swimming lessons, which experts recommend for children as young as 1; and finally, knowledge of child CPR.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the numbers remained relatively stable across Florida, data shows. But drownings started rising in 2021 and have continued to climb. Experts say many measures to protect children are still lacking, such as widespread access to swimming lessons, legislation that requires more pool safeguards and education about the dangers, especially among newcomers and visitors to the state.
Against that backdrop, a new contributing factor is likely behind the rise, experts say: increasingly addictive forms of technology such as phones that grant access to emails, texts and entertainment at one’s fingertips.
Though advocates have worked to educate the public and institute statewide safeguards, some of them feel that Florida lawmakers have resisted legislation that would truly make a difference. Numerous advocacy groups have popped up in Florida over the last decade, often in the wake of a drowning. But some of the parent-advocates themselves say the groups are too siloed to have the necessary influence.
Many experts and advocates feel that the most important piece — awareness of the danger itself — is still not getting across. Nicklaus Children’s Health System has conducted multiple news conferences this year as experts grow desperate to curb the surge in drowning deaths.
“It’s just not sticking,” said Malvina Duncan, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital injury prevention coordinator. “Parents are not taking measures. The level of attention is just not there.”
‘I just took my eyes off of them for a second’
A drowning child rarely makes a sound. And it takes only minutes to lose a child.
Most Florida drownings this year have happened in swimming pools, while more than a dozen have occurred in lakes and canals, particularly involving children with autism. But because young, curious children are drawn to water, any type can be deadly, and many of the deaths occurred when children were not supposed to be swimming. This year, multiple children drowned in bathtubs; the state’s first drowning of the year was in a hot tub at an Airbnb. In January, a 1-year-old boy drowned after getting into a mop bucket his mother had been using to clean a rug, according to state records.
The biggest factor, experts agree, is supervision. Many of the drownings this year happened while the parents or guardians were home with their children, state records show. But a temporary lapse in supervision — often lasting only seconds — still allowed the child to slip outside undetected.
“It seems like the same thing every time when we arrive at the scene, there’s an adult who says, ‘I just took my eyes off of them for a second or a minute,’” Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Christopher Davis-Partridge told the Sun Sentinel. “That’s all it takes for this to happen.”
Several of this year’s drownings illustrate how quickly and silently tragedy can strike:
- In July, an 18-month-old girl in Brevard County drowned after she got into the pool with her siblings while their father was mowing the lawn.
- In June, a 4-year-old boy in Broward County drowned after slipping out of the house and into the swimming pool while his family members were still asleep.
- In April, a woman was packing to return home from visiting a friend’s house in Escambia County when her 18-month-old daughter slipped out of the home and into the swimming pool undetected.
- In March, a man was trying to retrieve a dog that had gotten out of his Pinellas County home when his 1-year-old son got into the swimming pool and drowned.
- In February, a woman was cleaning up broken glass in the kitchen of her Hillsborough County home when her 1-year-old daughter got into a bathtub and drowned.
Despite the ease in which these drownings happen, parents continue to believe it won’t happen to them, and often criticize others on social media when news breaks.
Christina Canavan told the South Florida Sun Sentinel she had been asleep in the same room as her 15-month-old twin boys, Leyton and Jaxon, when they slipped out of her house in West Palm Beach and into the pool on Thanksgiving morning in 2015. First responders estimated they had only been in the pool for six or seven minutes.
Afterward, Canavan recalled a social media comment asking, “How did two children end up in the pool alone?” She stopped reading comments after that.
“I really think people just don’t believe it’s going to happen to them,” Canavan told the Sun Sentinel. “I think that it’s too much to fathom that they could actually have that happen. I think that they think that drowning happens to only bad parents — and that’s absolutely not true.”
Sometimes, parents are held criminally accountable for negligence, especially if found under the influence of substances. But nearly all of the parents who spoke to the Sun Sentinel said they were vigilant before their children’s deaths, and it still wasn’t enough. Several described themselves as “helicopter moms.”
“Nobody can watch your child 24 hours a day,” McGovern said. “You go pee, you load the dishwasher, you do your laundry, you help another child with homework. That toddler may be engrossed in the iPad or doing whatever they’re doing, thinking they’re going to sit there for the next five hours, but three seconds later they’re up and they’re out.”
Distractions
Several experts who spoke to the Sun Sentinel believe that technology is the biggest factor exacerbating an existing crisis. But education is lacking on the dangers posed by technology use when it comes to water safety.
Dr. Jahn Avarello, chief of emergency medicine services at Nicklaus Children’s Health System in Miami, says he can’t help but see a link to cellphone use and the rise in child drownings.
“Just going to the beach, you see parents who are sitting on their phones and not watching their kids, and the kids are running up and down the beach,” said Avarello, who has started speaking to colleagues and friends about the issue.
“It’s one of those things that is so easy to change,” he said. “Even just turning your phone to silent, out of office, or do not disturb. Just that little buzz, it just catches your head and you want to turn, you want to look at it. Next thing you know, the kid is underwater.”
In recent years, multiple Florida parents lost children to drowning while they were on their phones. In Bradenton in May, a mother was charged with child neglect causing great bodily harm after police said she was drinking beer and on her cellphone when her 4-year-old daughter drowned at a pool party, according to news reports. And in North Lauderdale in 2019, a woman was charged with aggravated manslaughter after deputies said she was texting when her two sons drowned in an apartment pool. They had been left unsupervised for two hours. Prosecutors later dropped the case.
“People are scrolling social media not paying attention, and for that minute, for that second, that’s all it takes is just that for your child to drown in a pool,” said Davis-Partridge, Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue Battalion Chief.
Barriers
Christina Martin thinks a $10 door alarm could have saved 2-year-old Gunner’s life.
In 2016, her family was staying at a home in Lauderhill when he slipped through the sliding glass doors and into the pool while he was supposed to be napping. Martin and her husband were watching a movie and heard nothing. After the movie, they thought he must have slept for an unusually long time and went to check on him. That was when they noticed the door was ajar.
Martin didn’t know at the time that a proper door alarm or pool fence would have protected her son. The Lauderhill home — a single-family home owned by family members — had no barriers except for a door chime, which didn’t sound repeatedly, as is recommended by experts. Martin wanted to find out why.
She discovered that a 2000 Florida law required homes to have one of five barriers to the pool: a pool fence, pool net, door alarm, pool alarm, or self-closing and latching door. But the state law has a “gap,” Martin said: Only homes built after the law’s passage in 2000 are required to install those protections. The home where her son drowned was built prior to that.
As is the case for many parents-turned-drowning prevention advocates, the lapse that contributed to Gunner’s death became Martin’s focus when advocating to protect other children. During the pandemic, she began pushing for a new state law requiring every house to have a pool fence at the time of sale. But the bill died twice in the Legislature, she said, after opposition from real estate agents who were concerned about additional steps required to sell homes.
Martin fears that, without legislation, families won’t know about the dangers present in their own homes, and more children will continue to die.
“Besides the families and the individuals who have been affected, the loved ones who have been affected by drownings, how many people would know that the No. 1 killer of kids for unintentional deaths is just in their backyard?” Martin said. “And not only that, but their house when they bought it last year, two years ago, five years ago, is not up to the Florida statute.”
Swimming lessons
Two-year-old Jake didn’t know how to swim when he slipped out of a home and into the nearby Intracoastal Waterway in New Smyrna Beach one evening in November 2013. It took his family members close to 30 minutes to find him in the dark.
Jake had started taking swim lessons, but they hadn’t taught him the skills he needed to survive, said his mother, Keri Morrison. She thinks Jake might have lived, had he taken what she calls “survival swim lessons” and known how to float.
Morrison still blames herself for her son’s death.
“He knew nothing, and you know, that kills me,” she said through tears last week, amid the sound of children splashing at the indoor pool her organization runs out of Palm Beach Gardens. “Knowing that my son needed me, and he didn’t know what to do.”
Momentary lapses in supervision are impossible to prevent entirely, advocates say, while pool fences and alarms can fail to work properly. But swimming lessons provide a key line of defense that can save a child who still ends up in the water.
Morrison now leads Live Like Jake, an organization that provides swim lessons and scholarships to children. She and other advocates and parents believe teaching survival skills in the water can begin as early as 6 months, if a child can sit up on their own. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children learn after age 1. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that water survival skills and participation in swim lessons reduced the risk of drowning by 88% in children ages one to four.
Despite the effectiveness of swim lessons, children throughout Florida still do not receive them. Money is often a barrier; studies show that children in lower-income families have much lower rates of swimming ability. Even though Florida offers free lessons, many families are stuck on waitlists, Morrison said, while her own program is at maximum capacity.
The aftermath of a drowning
Francesca Canonica’s 4-year-old son can’t speak.
He communicates by moving his eyes to the left or right. Wheelchair-bound, he is unable to use his limbs.
Two years ago, Canonica pulled her son from a lake behind her apartment building in West Palm Beach. A neighbor gave the then-22-month-old CPR before paramedics arrived, but he still suffered a severe brain injury as a result of the lack of oxygen. He now requires intensive medical care, including daily visits from home health aides, nine medications and a roster of specialists.
“My son’s whole life is going to be challenging for him,” said Canonica, who accepted an Alford plea in June to one count of neglect of a child causing great bodily harm and was sentenced to five months of probation. An Alford plea allows a defendant to accept a criminal sentence while maintaining their innocence.
Her son was initially on a ventilator, and doctors weren’t sure he would be able to breathe on his own, but he eventually was able to with the help of a tracheostomy in his neck, she said. Canonica now advocates for drowning prevention.
For every one child who dies from drowning, another seven end up in the emergency room, a number that has grown over time, according to national data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some survive just hours or days. Many others suffer severe brain damage that inhibits their ability to walk, eat, or smile.
The repercussions of non-fatal drownings are often overlooked. While Florida keeps data on child drowning deaths, the state doesn’t track non-fatal drowning outcomes.
“There’s no true database for that,” said Duncan, the injury prevention manager for Nicklaus Children’s Hospital. “We hear about the drownings that make the news. But unfortunately a lot of kids come in, and there is no brain activity. It’s devastating.”
When a child goes underwater, their oxygen supply to the brain drops instantly, a phenomenon called hypoxia. Irreversible brain damage occurs within 4 to 10 minutes, and another few minutes of hypoxia can lead to coma or death.
Avarello frequently treats children who arrive in his emergency room after being submerged in pools and lakes. He sees outcomes that range from children who go home the same day to those who die within hours or days, to children with severe organ damage or various levels of brain damage.
“It really depends on how long they were hypoxic, and how fast they got oxygen into them, and the interventions that occurred,” Avarello said.
Canonica often feels like she is grieving a son who is still there.
“He’s 4 years old now, so he doesn’t really know the difference between his old life and his new life,” she said. “So it’s like we’re grieving the little boy that he used to be, but it’s not really grieving because he survived it.”
Canavan, the mother of the twins, experienced both forms of grief after she lost one of her twins to drowning right away while the other survived with brain damage for four years.
It was Thanksgiving Day in 2015. They woke her at 5 a.m. She got up, got them their bottles and then returned to the bedroom, where they all fell asleep, the boys in the crib and her in the bed. Her then-husband was out running an errand.
She set a timer on her phone to wake up. When it went off, the boys were still asleep, so she dozed off again. Then she woke up to her husband screaming her name.
“Everything was in slow motion,” Canavan said. “It felt like I couldn’t get to the back door fast enough.”
Canavan and her husband had a door alarm, but they didn’t hear it that morning. The sliding glass door to their pool didn’t latch properly, something they had been meaning to fix. And they were still in the process of getting a pool fence.
When the doctors were able to get a pulse, Canavan thought her sons were going to be OK. She didn’t realize the damage that drowning could do to the brain.
Leyton died on life support about 12 hours after paramedics arrived. But Jaxon woke up three days later. Though he could open his eyes, he had severe brain damage. For four years, he could not do anything on his own, Canavan said. A nurse practically lived in the house with them. Eventually, he regained his ability to smile and cry, something doctors had told them he would never be able to do. But then he got sick, Canavan said, and died in hospice in 2019. Canavan now works as a survival swim instructor in Boynton Beach.
When children are pulled from the water still breathing, the extent of damage to the brain hinges on how quickly bystanders can start CPR, Davis-Partridge said: “The sooner it is started and the fewer the interruptions, the better.”
“If your phone is 100 yards away, do not run and get the phone,” said Avarello, the emergency medicine chief at Nicklaus. “Do two minutes of CPR with rescue breaths. Make sure you get oxygen in.”
The longterm aftermath
Speaking to the Sun Sentinel years later, parents said the loss of their children to drowning has altered what they did with their careers, their relationships, how they see the world, and their own parenting. Already neurotic, several parents said they became far more so. Most of all, they wished they had known at the time what they only learned after their children’s deaths.
After Em died, McGovern and her husband moved out of the Coral Springs house, breaking their mortgage and tanking their credit because they couldn’t be near the pool that had claimed their daughter’s life. The loss devastated them financially; the hospital bill alone was $500,000. They also had different approaches to grieving: McGovern wanted to talk about her daughter all the time, she said, but her husband couldn’t bear it, a common dynamic shared by other families.
Still, they respected one another’s approach, McGovern said, and never blamed one another for their daughter’s death. Martin and her husband did the same; it helped, she said, that they were both home at the time, so neither could fault the other.
Other couples struggled. Though Canavan and her husband never blamed one another for the deaths of their twins, she said, they divorced years later.
“I think that we had a really good relationship,” Canavan said. “I do personally believe, several years later, a lot of not dealing with the trauma, me not dealing with trauma like I should have, that definitely played a role in us splitting.”
For many parents, the first months and years passed in a dark blur. Several parents, like Martin, the advocate for legislation, pored over drowning research and the specific issues they believe contributed to their children’s deaths. They struggled with knowing that their own lack of awareness — of the need for pool fences, issues with floaties, proper door alarms or adequate swim lessons— had contributed. Trying to spread that to others felt like the only thing that made sense.
For McGovern, there is no stopping.
“I’m a different person,” she said. “Whoever knew me then, they’re amazed to see what I do now. But I don’t feel like it’s me. I really feel like it’s that fire that just pushes me to do it. Like I can’t rest when I watch these numbers and I see that. It just motivates me more to work harder.”
The night before Em died, McGovern had made her daughter a promise. The family had agreed to donate her organs, meaning they could not be there when she was taken off life support. But the hospital had allowed them to have a “slumber party” with her instead, McGovern said. She slept in Em’s bed that night. The next day, she clipped her daughter’s hair, took out her earrings, and told her she would do whatever she could to help other families. Then she walked away.
Sun Sentinel staff photographer Carline Jean contributed to this report.
Layers of protection
The most important methods to prevent child drownings are adult supervision, barriers to pool access, swimming lessons for young children and CPR training. Additional drowning prevention resources can be found at https://www.myflfamilies.com/watersafety.
Supervision
Supervision is the most important factor preventing children from accessing water when they should not be. Even small distractions like chores can be all it takes for a parent to lose sight of a child who ends up in water, experts say.
“It’s usually a couple of things that go wrong that lead to a drowning incident, but undoubtedly an absence of supervision and the everyday stresses for parents absolutely play a role,” said Amy Peden, a leading international injury prevention researcher and advocate.
Reduce distractions: “Parents are trying to multitask,” said Malvina Duncan the Injury Prevention Coordinator for Nicklaus Children’s Hospital “They are doing a lot of things, but doing it from home.
“Parents think, ‘As long as I am there, it is OK,” Duncan said. “But we know that drowning is silent. We know that often it’s not even recognized until it’s too late.”
Assign a water watcher: Pool parties, family gatherings and holiday cookouts are among the highest-risk settings for child drownings in Florida. Already this summer, several child drowning incidents have occurred at pool parties in Florida, the most recent a 4-year-old boy in Plantation on July 19, who was taken to a hospital in critical condition.“When you’re at a pool party, make sure that there’s an adult water watcher whose sole responsibility is to watch that body of water without distraction. Someone who is sober,” said Anna Stewart, Drowning Prevention Coordinator for Palm Beach County.
Dress swimmers in bright colors: Advocates encourage children to wear bright-colored clothing when they swim to increase their visibility underwater.
Barriers
Barriers to the pool form a second layer of protection after supervision.
Pool barriers: A 2000 Florida law required new homes to have one of five barriers to the pool: a pool fence, pool net, door alarm, pool alarm, or self-closing and latching door. But homes built earlier may not have them, including Airbnbs where seven children in Florida have drowned this year.
Pet doors: Parents should secure pet doors and use door alarms to alert them to someone exiting the home.
Swimming lessons
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children begin learning to swim as early as age 1.
“Swim lessons are super important in addition to supervision, but also teaching children, ‘Hey, you have to ask a grown-up to go in a body of water or near a body of water,’” said Anna Stewart, manager of the Drowning Prevention Coalition of Palm Beach County.
When to avoid the water: Children should be taught not to go near/into any water, including pools, lakes, buckets, bathtubs, without telling an adult/having an adult present/nearby.
False sense of security: Floaties or other devices can give children and parents unwarranted confidence, which can increase drowning risks.
Where to find lessons: The Florida Department of Health statewide offers a swimming lesson voucher program for eligible families with children less than a year old and up to 17 years old.
CPR
When a child is pulled from a pool, lake, canal or other body of water, every second counts. Acting quickly to provide CPR and manually push oxygenated blood to the brain dictates the quality of life the child has afterward.
Start right away: Experts say begin with rescue breaths. “Even if you’re only doing hands-only CPR though, that’s better than nothing,” said Christopher Davis-Partridge, a South Florida first responder and Battalion Chief of EMS for Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue. “Just start compressions.”
If the child is conscious, put the child on their side to prevent aspiration, he said.
Sign up for free classes: Classes are offered in Broward County through several local cities and fire departments, Broward Health, American Red Cross and the American Heart Association. Classes are offered in Palm Beach County through Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, American Red Cross and others.