Warning: This article contains content which some readers may find distressing.
An eight-year-old has died after apparently being sucked into a pipe whilst swimming in a hotel pool.
The little girl was spending time in the pool at DoubleTree by Hilton Houston Brookhollow in Houston, Texas, when she vanished on Saturday (23 March).
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She was reported missing at 6:00pm when her parents couldn’t find her anywhere.
Founder of Texas EquuSearch, Tim Miller, said that his team and him were called to the city’s hotel and were baffled by the circumstances around the youngster’s disappearance.
He explained to ABC13 Houston: “Did she wander off? Did somebody take her, or what?
“So, anyhow, we mobilised a lot of people. We had people actually searching outside and in different rooms and everything.”
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As officers searched through the hotel, the Houston Police Department, along with Miller’s search and rescue non-profit team, reviewed security footage.
The footage showed that the girl had disappeared underwater and never came back to the surface.
The Houston Fire Department told LADbible that the team did not find anything upon their initial search of the four large pipes in the lazy river pool at the hotel.
The swimming pool was drained out and a small remote camera was attached onto a pole and sent nearly 20 feet inside.
At about 11:30pm, rescuers made the tragic discovery using the camera and a scent-tracking dog.
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Miller said that the girl’s ‘little hand part of her body’ appeared first and it seemed she had been ‘wedged’ deep inside the pipe.
He added that she was in there ‘so very, very tight’ that he doesn’t think she decided to ‘swim in here and see what’s here’.
Miller claims that the swimming pool’s pipe had malfunctioned and instead of pumping out water, it was sucking it in.
It was a long 13-hour process but responders from the Houston Fire Department were eventually able to retrieve the little girl’s body.
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“Many of us had to wipe tears from our eyes,” Miller said. “I never, ever thought in a million years it was going to end up as bad as it ended up...there is a grieving family out there, and it is going to be a long, painful healing process over this one.”
The child’s tragic death is being investigated by Houston’s homicide division and it is being probed as a drowning.
Miller added that it was ‘one of the saddest ones we’ve seen in a good while’.
Hilton Hotels & Resorts declined to comment to ABC13 but did tell them that the pool is temporarily closed.
A Hilton hotels spokesperson told LADbible Group: "Hilton offers our sincere condolences to the family and loved ones in the tragic loss of a young girl at the DoubleTree by Hilton Houston Brookhollow.
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"This property is independently owned and operated by a third party. Hilton does not own, manage, or control the day-to-day operations of the property and does not employ any of the property’s staff or its third-party operators."
LADbible Group has contacted the legal representatives of DoubleTree by Hilton in Houston Brookhollow for a comment.
LADbible has contacted the Houston Police Department for a comment.
Jess Battison