An 18-month-old boy was pulled from a backyard pool in Gilbert, Arizona, on February 8 and 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 watched the Super Bowl. Gilbert police responded around 17:30 local time (00:30 GMT) for a reported drowning. He was taken to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center, where Dr. Aryan Toosi pronounced him dead at 18:20.

Two police officers had separately observed possible signs of life in the child before and after the death pronouncement, according to the report, and raised the issue with Dr. Toosi. Bodycam footage captured an exchange in which Dr. Toosi told the officers to "please do your thing and let me do my thing" BBC. The child was then moved to the hospital's cold room — a refrigerated morgue space for storing deceased patients.

Hours later, a transporter from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office arrived to collect the body and found the child still breathing. He was flown to a second hospital, where he recovered and has since been released BBC.

Gilbert police are recommending negligence charges against the parents. Investigators noted a strong smell of marijuana at the home and concluded the toddler may have had unsupervised access to the pool. 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 an internal review 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 why the initial death declaration was made and the condition the child was in when the transporter found him.

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

This case touches on three separate domains — pediatric drowning response, emergency medicine judgment, and hospital morgue procedures — that rarely intersect in a single incident. Drowning in young children is typically evaluated based on how long the child was underwater, water temperature, and how quickly resuscitation began. Young children possess a biological reflex, called the mammalian dive reflex, that can extend survival longer than the standard window doctors usually expect for cardiac arrest. That physiological fact is likely to matter significantly in understanding why officers' observations of possible life signs were not acted upon.

The bodycam footage raises a more direct question: whether the officers' observations were dismissed as medically irrelevant by the physician, or whether there was a failure in how those observations were communicated and escalated through hospital channels. Hospital internal reviews and state medical boards typically separate diagnostic error — getting the medical judgment wrong — from process failure, where the right information reached the right person but something broke down in how it was handled. What Mercy Gilbert's internal review concluded remains undisclosed and may determine which framework applies here.

For prosecutors, the case presents multiple lines of potential liability. There is parental negligence tied to pool supervision and the marijuana reference at the scene; the physician's judgment in pronouncing death; and institutional protocol at both the medical center and medical examiner's office. Arizona's negligent-supervision statutes for child drowning typically rest on evidence of failed barriers — like an unsecured pool — or documented lapses in caregiver attention, which the marijuana reference appears designed to support. Whether that evidence is sufficient to charge the parents separately from the hospital error, defense attorneys will likely challenge regardless of what prosecutors decide.

The child's full medical journey — from poolside resuscitation through the morgue interval to discharge from the second hospital — remains undocumented in public records. Without access to those medical files, any complete accounting of what happened in those critical hours will remain incomplete.