Chinese boy, 4, drowns in spa pool metres from mother as she looks at mobile phone
Security video shows child struggled to survive for three minutes as his mother stood with her back to him checking her phone in Shaanxi province
A four-year-old Chinese boy drowned in a pool at a spa while his mother looked at her smartphone only a few metres away, mainland media reported.
A security video showed the boy, Haohao, struggled to survive in the water for three minutes before he drowned in Xianyang, the Shaanxi provincial newspaper China Business News reported.
His mother, surnamed Xiao, and several other people in the same hot-spring pool all failed to notice he was drowning. His body was found submerged in the pool about an hour later.
Xiao had taken both Haohao and his six-year-old sister to the spa centre. Initially her children had been playing in the shallow children’s pool area.
However, the video footage showed that Haohao climbed over the edge of the children’s pool area and entered the 1.3-metre-deep area of pool where Xiao was standing with her back to him looking at her mobile phone.