2-year-old girl dies in backyard pool

Boy, 13, rescued from Lake Ontario in Oshawa

The lifeless body of a 2 ½-year-old girl was pulled from a backyard pool in North York Saturday.

Police said the girl was found without vital signs in a pool on Melrose Ave. near Elm Rd. around 1:45 p.m.

Just hours later Durham Region police officers plunged into Lake Ontario at Oshawa’s Lakeview Park to pull a 13-year-old boy to shore and administer CPR, likely saving his life.

“The officers went into the water and got to the young lad and brought him to shore, he’s OK,” said Staff Sgt. Sean Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald said the boy was about 10 to 15 metres out in the lake when he ran into difficulty at about 5 p.m. and, had the officers not responded quickly to the call, “it definitely could have been a different outcome.”

Asked if he’d call the rescuers heroes, Fitzgerald answered: “I would think so, yes.”

There have been a spate of drownings and other fatal water-related incidents in southern Ontario since the beginning of summerlike weather; more than a dozen drownings have occurred in southern Ontario since June, police say.

In the Melrose Ave. incident earlier in the day in Toronto, emergency crews tried to revive the child on scene before rushing her to the Hospital for Sick Children. She was declared dead soon after.

Police had no details about the incident, and could not give a definitive cause of death for the little girl.

Neighbours gathered on sidewalks and porches along the quiet, tree-shaded street Saturday afternoon, shaking their heads and trading bits of information about the accident.

Many of them said they heard about it on their car radios and rushed home to find out which of their neighbours had experienced the tragedy.

One neighbour who wouldn’t comment or give her name said the child’s older brother was in her home and he didn’t know yet what had happened to his little sister.

Melrose Ave. resident Alyson Pancer said she was reminded of the pain her family felt when her 9-year-old cousin drowned in a day camp swimming pool while diving for pennies 15 years ago.

“No matter how many times you hear these things it doesn’t get any easier,” Prancer said.

“These things are such preventable deaths,” she said. “That’s what makes it so, so sad. Their lives will never be the same again.”

A police officer standing outside the house, which was blocked off with police tape, said there was a barrier around the backyard pool.