An 18-month-old boy pulled from a backyard pool in Gilbert, Arizona, on February 8 was declared dead by an emergency room physician — then discovered breathing roughly five hours later inside the hospital's morgue refrigeration area, according to a newly released police report BBC.

The child was found face down in the pool while his family gathered to watch the Super Bowl. Gilbert police responded to the home around 17:30 local time (00:30 GMT) for a reported drowning BBC. He was taken to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center, where Dr. Aryan Toosi pronounced him dead at 18:20.

The police report states that two officers had separately observed possible signs of life in the child before he was pronounced dead, and again raised the issue with Dr. Toosi afterward Facebook/Fox 8. According to the report, Dr. Toosi told the officers to "please do your thing and let me do my thing." The exchange was captured on police bodycam footage later obtained by an NBC News affiliate BBC.

The child was moved to the hospital's cold room — a morgue refrigeration space used to store deceased patients — where he remained for hours Guardian. A transporter from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office, arriving to collect the body, found him still breathing. He was then flown to a second hospital, where he recovered and has since been released BBC.

Gilbert police are recommending negligence charges against the child's parents. Investigators noted a strong smell of marijuana at the home and concluded the toddler may have had unsupervised access to the pool BBC. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has not indicated whether it will pursue charges against the parents, the physician, or hospital staff.

Dr. Toosi's attorney, Scott Holden, told the Associated Press that "there is much more to this case, both factually and medically, than has been reported thus far." Mercy Gilbert Medical Center said it conducted a review of the care provided and called the incident "a heartbreaking situation," declining to release further details BBC. Medical records for the child were not included in the police report, leaving open questions about the clinical basis for the initial death declaration and the condition in which the child was found by the transporter.

National coverage of the case accelerated this week: the Guardian reported on the morgue discovery on July 7 Guardian, followed by broader wire pickup, including a CBS News/AP report published July 8 CBS News.

The case sits at an unusual intersection of pediatric drowning response, emergency medicine liability, and morgue-transfer protocol — three domains that rarely appear in the same incident report. Drowning deaths in young children are typically adjudicated on the basis of submersion time, water temperature, and resuscitation response; the mammalian dive reflex in toddlers has, in documented cases, prolonged survivability well beyond conventional cardiac-arrest windows. That physiological wrinkle is likely to feature heavily in any review of why signs of life were reportedly dismissed at the bedside.

The bodycam exchange, if accurately characterized in the police report, raises a narrower but sharper question: whether officers' observations were treated as clinically irrelevant by hospital staff, or whether a breakdown occurred in how those observations were escalated. Hospital review processes and state medical boards typically distinguish between diagnostic error and process failure, and the outcome of Mercy Gilbert's internal review — details of which it has declined to disclose — may determine which framework applies.

For Maricopa County prosecutors, the calculus now involves at least three potential lines of liability: parental negligence tied to pool supervision and the marijuana odor noted at the scene, physician judgment in the death pronouncement, and institutional protocol at the medical center and medical examiner's office. Arizona's negligent-supervision statutes for child drowning cases typically hinge on evidence of a barrier failure or documented lapse in caregiver attention, which the report's marijuana reference appears intended to support. Whether that evidentiary thread is strong enough to sustain charges against the parents, independent of the extraordinary hospital error that followed, is likely to be contested by defense counsel regardless of what the county attorney ultimately decides.

The child's full medical trajectory — from poolside recovery through the morgue interval to his eventual discharge from a second hospital — remains undocumented in public records. Absent those medical files, any accounting of what happened in the hours between pronouncement and rescue will stay incomplete.