An 18-month-old Gilbert, Arizona toddler declared dead after a backyard pool near-drowning in February 2026 was found alive hours later in a hospital's cold room, according to police records released this week and first reported by KNXV-TV, the Phoenix ABC affiliate The Guardian. The boy, referred to publicly as "baby Vincent," survived and has since been released from the hospital.

The sequence began at roughly 5:30pm on February 8, 2026, when first responders were dispatched to a Gilbert home after a report of a drowning in the family's backyard pool The Guardian. He was transported to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead around 6:30pm — about an hour after crews arrived. Roughly five hours after that pronouncement, police were notified the child was breathing. A team from the Maricopa County medical examiner's office discovered him alive in the hospital's cold room, where bodies awaiting autopsy are kept, and he was flown to another facility for treatment The Guardian.

The Associated Press independently corroborated the account through its own reporting, matching the timeline of the declaration, the discovery, and the transfer AP News.

Police records indicate the error was not a matter of ambiguous vital signs alone. Two Gilbert police officers reported observing possible signs of life in the child multiple times before he was moved to the cold room, according to the released report The Guardian. The report also quotes Dr. Aryan Toosi telling an officer, "Please do your thing and let me do my thing. I went to medical school for a reason." Scott Holden, an attorney representing Toosi, is named in the report as counsel for the physician.

Gilbert police are recommending negligence charges against the toddler's parents. The recommendation cites a strong odor of marijuana detected at the home and doors left open that allowed the child unsupervised access to the pool The Guardian. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has confirmed it is reviewing the case, though no charging decision has been announced. A GoFundMe page set up in February, around the time of the incident, described the child's needs for extensive therapy going forward.

Mercy Gilbert Medical Center has said it conducted a thorough internal review of the care provided during the incident and has made changes intended to strengthen clinical practice, though the hospital has not detailed what those changes entail The Guardian. It took roughly five months for Gilbert police to release the public records documenting the incident, a delay that drew separate scrutiny from local outlets including Fox 8 Facebook/Fox8.

Pediatric drowning cases pose recognized diagnostic hazards that this case illustrates in unusually stark terms. Cold-water immersion and hypothermia in young children can suppress metabolic function to the point that vital signs become difficult to detect by standard clinical means, and pediatric literature has long documented cases of prolonged submersion followed by neurologically intact recovery — the physiological basis for aggressive resuscitation protocols in cold-water drowning even after extended downtime. What separates this case from that clinical narrative is the reported presence of law enforcement officers flagging signs of life after a death pronouncement had already been made, a detail that shifts the question from purely medical uncertainty to institutional process — how a hospital handles conflicting observations once a legal determination of death has occurred.

The five-month gap between the incident and the public release of records will likely draw attention independent of the clinical questions. Delayed disclosure in cases involving potential negligence findings against both parents and medical staff tends to complicate parallel review processes, particularly when a county attorney's office is weighing charges that depend on establishing a clear sequence of decisions and observations.

The county attorney review will need to address two distinct threads that happen to intersect at Mercy Gilbert's cold room door: whether the parents' conduct at the pool meets the threshold for criminal negligence, and whether any hospital or medical examiner personnel bear responsibility for the death pronouncement itself. Arizona's negligent child endangerment statutes and any potential licensing board inquiry into the pronouncing physician are likely to proceed on separate tracks, with different evidentiary standards and different institutional actors. How Mercy Gilbert's internal changes translate into revised protocol — particularly around confirming death in pediatric cold-water cases — may become a point of interest for hospital accreditation bodies even absent a criminal filing.