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Drowned boy quietly slipped out of sight
By LEANORA MINAI, Times Staff Writer ST. PETERSBURG -- The oven was hot, so Robert Jackson shooed his toddler into the living room to play with the other children. He and his wife, Karen Jackson, went back to preparing the pork chop dinner, but stopped when they didn't see 14-month-old Ryan. "Where's the baby?" asked Karen Jackson, 37. An hour later, after a search involving neighbors and about 20 officers, Ryan was found floating in the canal behind the family's house in the Placido Bayou neighborhood. He is St. Petersburg's first accidental drowning victim this year. Police say Ryan might have slipped out of the house Thursday through an open sliding glass door to a screened lanai with a door to the back yard. On Friday, while scores of friends called the family's house, Robert and Karen Jackson faced the unthinkable: burying their "bruiser," a chubby cheeked, blue-eyed boy who wasn't afraid of anything, not even injections. "He was out of our sight a minute, maybe two," Robert Jackson, 42, an account executive for a title company, said amid sobs outside his home, 1001 45th Ave. NE. Jackson, whose hands and feet were cut from the barnacles he scraped while swimming in the murky canal, searching for his son, was concerned Friday with how long it took -- 11 minutes -- for an officer to get to his house. "I'm not blaming the police," he said. "This is not the police's fault, but it did seem like a very long time to get here." The last time he saw his baby was when he looked down in the kitchen and Ryan was at his feet. He opened the oven to check on dinner and sent Ryan to the living room so wouldn't get burned. At first, the family thought Ryan was hiding. The parents and three other children searched each room of the waterfront house, then they ran outside. They searched for five to 10 minutes before dialing 911, according to a police report. A St. Petersburg police dispatcher answered the call at 8:02 p.m. Breathing heavily, Jackson told the dispatcher that he lived on the water and could not find his baby for 10 to 15 minutes. "There was a lot going on," Jackson told the dispatcher. "We were just talking, and all of a sudden, we didn't see him." The dispatcher didn't have a patrol officer to send right away. Each officer in the area was busy on a call. Three minutes passed before a patrol officer was pulled off a call downtown and sent to the house. He was the first to arrive at 8:13 p.m. "Eleven minutes to get here is a long time," Jackson said. Police Chief Chuck Harmon said his thoughts and prayers are with the family. But a shorter response time to the life-or-death emergency would not have changed the outcome, the chief said. The department's average response time for such calls is 7.5 minutes. "By the time we got the call, the baby may have already been in the water," Harmon said. The chief said the response time and fact that an officer was not immediately available to send to the report of a missing child does not indicate any kind of staffing problem. The department is short 41 patrol officers. Several minutes after the first officer arrived, eight of the area's community police officers -- they do not typically answer 911 calls but work on neighborhood crime problems -- began showing up, along with other officers. "When you have 19 people going out there, obviously you have enough people working the street," Harmon said. "That's what it tells me." Two of the community police officers, Doug Allen and Ray Merritt, got into a neighbor's boat and searched the mangroves along the canal. The officers saw something that looked like paper, but it turned out to be Ryan's diaper. Merritt dove into the water and handed Ryan, who was wearing a T-shirt with blue sharks, to Allen, who tried to revive him. Ryan was pronounced dead at All Children's Hospital at 9:22 p.m. Ryan was special. When his parents married two years ago, they brought children from their previous marriages. Ryan was their child together. "We were trying to bring our family together," his father said, "and Ryan did."
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From the Times South Pinellas desks |
