Mum ‘left 3-year-old son to drown at water park while on her phone’ | US News

A mother allegedly ignored her toddler and was preoccupied on her phone for hours until he drowned at a water park.

Jessica Weaver’s 3-year-old Anthony Leo Malave was found in a four-foot deep part of a pool during the soft opening of the Camp Cohen Water Park on the Saturday before Mother’s Day. The boy was pulled out of the pool in El Paso, Texas, and died at a hospital the next day.

A witness said Weaver, 35, was ‘by herself on her phone, never looking up or paying attention to anything’, according to the criminal complaint obtained by the El Paso Times.

Another witness said Weaver was seen ‘all “dolled up” sitting outside the pool, on her phone taking photographs the entire time he saw her’ and that he never saw her child.

Weaver was ‘singing along to a song that was playing and she was laying down, looking at her phone approximately seven minutes before the child/victim was getting pulled out of the water’, according to another witness.

A witness claimed to see Weaver encouraging her son to enter the pool by gesturing with her hand and then walking away and leaving him alone, states the complaint. The witness said it took a woman in a yellow top roughly five minutes to run to the toddler after lifeguards blew whistles to evacuate the pool.

The boy was not wearing a life vest though they were available at the water park.

Weaver was charged with injury to a child by omission and criminal negligence and arrested in Indiana and booked into El Paso County Jail on August 30.

She was released on a $100,000 surety bond on September 22.

Weaver has filed a $1million lawsuit against the city alleging ‘gross negligence’ by the water park and untrained lifeguards.

One of Weaver’s lawyers, Ryan MacLeod, said the criminal charges against her are retaliation for her lawsuit against the city.

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