A hotel management company says an 8-year-old girl’s parents are to blame after a freak incident where the child was sucked into a pool pipe and drowned.
On March 23, Aliyah Lynette Jaico and her family were enjoying an afternoon of swimming at a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Houston, when the girl disappeared.
Jaico’s family alleges in a civil lawsuit that after searching for the missing girl for 30 minutes, they went to the hotel’s staff to ask them to review security footage, who refused to do so until police arrived.
Area police were not called until nearly an hour after Jaico went missing, and her body was later found in a pipe deep inside the pool’s mechanical systems.
The family sued the management companies operating the hotel, alleging the death was the “direct result” of negligence at the property to maintain a functioning pool.
In documents filed Wendesday, Northwest Hospitality Services, LLC, alleged it was Jaico’s family who “engaged in negligent acts and/or omissions that proximately caused the alleged injuries and damages.”
In April, another company named in the suit, Unique Crowne Hospitality, made similar arguments.
The family has pushed back on suggestions it is to blame.
“A lot of people are making comments about her [the mother] … that she wasn’t there, she was missing or she may have been in the hotel room. None of that is true,” attorney Richard Nava, who is representing Jaico’s family, said in March.
He said Jaico may have been trying to save her 5-year-old sister from being sucked into the pipe. The younger girl was later pulled out of the pool by a 13-year-old cousin, but by then Jaico had gone missing.
“Her poor little body was contorted when she was sucked into this hole and pipe 20 feet back. Her body was inside of the motor when she had to be extracted,” Nava continued at the time. “They had to break up concrete in order to extract her, cut pipe. It was absolutely horrific.”