CNN reported last week that music mogul Usher’s five year old son, Usher V, nearly drowned in an awful pool incident. The child was being supervised by his Aunt at his Fulton County, GA home and got his arm stuck in the pool drain.
CNN reported : “According to a police incident report obtained by ET, the child was swimming and playing around the pool under the supervision of his aunt, Rena Oden, when he fell to the bottom of the pool and subsequently became stuck in the drain. Attempts by Oden and the housekeeper to remove him were unsuccessful, but luckily a pair of subcontractors — Benjamin Crews and Eugene Stachurski — working on a sound system in the house were able to pull the boy from the pool and revive him with CPR.”
The child spent the night in the ICU at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Hospital and his breathing tube has been removed. Warmer weather often brings about an increase of swimming related traumas. Owners of pools owe specific duties to guests using their facilities under the law of premises liability. This imposes a certain amount of responsibility on behalf of the homeowner to ensure that their property is maintained in a reasonably safe condition.
At Shapiro, Cohen and Basinger, Ltd. we are well versed in dealing with pool related traumas. We have developed significant expertise in cases of injury resulting from diving into in ground or above ground swimming pools and sustaining paralyzing neck injuries. In many private pools, even where there is a “deep” end and a shallow end it is surprising how quickly a diver can get into the shallow end on a dive and sustain cervical trauma. Additionally, drownings at public or private pools can often occur when either the lifeguards are not paying careful attention or when the staffing is insufficient. Drain cover failures like what happened to Usher’s child are also a source of liability against pool manufacturers or homeowners.