MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. — A mother is speaking out after authorities said her 4-year-old daughter drowned in a backyard pool at a short-term rental home in northeast Miami-Dade earlier this month, raising renewed concerns about pool safety requirements.
It happened on March 5 at a home in the 20200 block of Northeast 15th Avenue, in the county’s Ives Estates area, where Kennedi Ray and her family had been staying while visiting from Atlanta.
“I lost my child. I lost my 4-year-old. She only got four years here. We loved her so much. We miss her so much,” Adeanah Francis, Kennedi’s mother, said on Tuesday.
Adam Finkel, the family’s attorney, said Kennedi was able to get outside while others in the home were sleeping. She was later found in the pool and did not survive.
“A child got access to the backyard. No alarm went off, no barriers are there, and we lost Kennedi,” he said. “The law requires safety measures in place, barriers, alarms, the exact type of simple things that keep Kennedi with us.”
Earlier this year, Local 10 reported on Florida’s Residential and Pool Safety Act, which requires residential pools to have safety features such as barriers, fences, or self-closing gates to help prevent young children from accessing the water.
Francis said she hopes no other parent has to endure the same pain.
“I am a mother. I don’t want any one of you to go through this pain,” she said while in tears.
Finkel also urged homeowners who rent out properties to ensure they are complying with safety laws.
“To all the homeowners out there listening that are renting their homes to short-term rentals … do you know what you’re doing if you’re a homeowner with a pool?” he asked. “Does your pool have a fence? Does it have alarms? Does it have all of the safety measures, life-critical safety measures around the pool that need to be there?”
Finkle says Kennedi’s family is expected to file a lawsuit against the rental home company in the coming weeks.
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