A mother whose 5-year-old daughter fell overboard from a Disney cruise ship in June will not face charges of child neglect, according to a Florida county state attorney’s office.
The Disney Cruise Line ship, the Disney Dream, was sailing in international waters from the Bahamas to Fort Lauderdale in Florida on June 29 when the child fell, a memorandum from the Broward County office said.
The girl’s father jumped in after her and they were both rescued and brought back on board. Videos of the incident, the memo noted, were posted to social media, where they were widely shared. Many commenters online blamed the girl’s parents for her fall saying they had endangered her to take photos.
Prosecutors decided not to charge the mother in July, a move first reported by the Daily Mail on Sunday. The memo outlining that decision contained new details about how the girl had fallen from the fourth deck of the cruise ship and what transpired after she was in the water.
According to the memo by Melissa Kelly, the assistant state attorney in charge of the office’s child fatalities and abuse unit, the mother, father and daughter were on their first cruise together, walking around the ship’s running track to explore the ship.
At around 11:30 a.m., the mother was taking photos of her daughter with her cellphone when the child climbed onto the railing encircling the running track. The railing was positioned in front of a port hole, which the mother told investigators she assumed contained a glass barrier. Her daughter lost her balance and fell backward through the port hole into the water — a distance of 49 feet.
The mother said, according to the document, that her daughter had taken swim lessons but could not swim. The father was about 10 feet ahead on the track, but turned around when he heard the mother scream. When he saw his daughter in the water, he jumped in after her, triggering the sensors of the ship’s man overboard alarm, which had not been set off when the girl fell in because she was too small.
Once the father was in the water, he called out his daughter’s name and she responded, which allowed him to locate her and keep her afloat until help arrived. According to the memo, he sustained “back injuries” from his repeated attempts to pull his daughter above the surface while treading water. A rescue boat was launched at 11:40 a.m. and retrieved the father and daughter at 11:49 a.m., the memo said.
The two were brought to the ship’s medical center, where the daughter was kept for nine hours for observation. The father remained in the medical center until the ship docked the next day, at which point he was brought to Broward Health Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with hypothermia, lactic acidosis — a side effect of overexercising — and two spinal fractures. In a follow-up evaluation, the daughter was also found to have mild hypothermia and lactic acidosis.
While falling from a cruise ship is rare, most people who do fall do not survive. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, 25 people fell overboard, and 17 died, according to a Cruise Lines International Association report. Disney Cruise Line did not respond to a request for comment.
The family was not identified and their names were redacted from a public records request. Ms. Kelly decided that all evidence pointed to an unfortunate accident rather than intentional neglect.
“While the defendant’s conduct is arguably negligent and irresponsible, it does not rise to the egregious level of conduct necessary to establish criminal culpable negligence,” Ms. Kelly wrote in the memo.
She noted that the mother was irresponsible, but the incident was a result of a “momentary lapse in proper judgment” and appeared to be an isolated incident.
Amanda Holpuch contributed reporting.
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