A young boy who drowned in a pool in the front yard of his Hobart home was unsupervised when he fell in, a coroner has found.
Four-year-old Tallen John Pitt was found unresponsive in a pop-up above-ground pool in Bridgewater on November 7, 2020.
In his findings, Coroner Robert Webster revealed that Tallen’s mother had left him in the lounge room while she went to the bathroom, briefly calling out his name to check on him.
When she emerged from the bathroom around five minutes later, her partner had just arrived home and asked about Tallen’s whereabouts.
The couple began searching for the young boy, with the partner looking in nearby streets and his mother checking inside the house.
She eventually found Tallen floating face down in the pool near the top railing, unresponsive, cold to the touch and purple in colour.
Despite efforts, Tallen could not be revived and was pronounced dead a short time later.
Webster said the mother admitted to police that the pool lacked the required safety fencing and explained they were planning to erect a fence themselves after payday, which would have been two days after the drowning.
The coroner said this would have been illegal unless they were licensed builders.
He also noted that her partner blamed her for Tallen’s death and said the couple had since separated.
Webster said her partner claimed he returned home to find the boy’s mother “on the couch in a sleepy state”, having “smoked two to three cones of cannabis” before he left the house that morning.
Police concluded that the drowning was not suspicious and believed Tallen had repeatedly tried to climb into the pool before falling in and being unable to get out.
“Whether the lack of supervision was due to [his mother] being asleep or in the bathroom does not change the fact that Tallen was not appropriately supervised,” Webster said.
“The risk to Tallen was heightened by the fact the front door was unlocked which, given the absence of pool fencing, meant that once he was not supervised he had unimpeded access to the pool.”
Webster recommended that the state government consider implementing legislation similar to New South Wales that creates an offence for the owner of premises with a pool not surrounded by a childproof barrier or fence.
He also suggested that the Brighton Council implement a program to check pools within its municipality for compliance with fencing requirements and councils run an education program highlighting pool safety rules and legal requirements before each summer.
