A Christmas getaway to the desert started out with food and fun for a Texas family last year but took a sharp turn when one of their children nearly died in their vacation home’s backyard pool.
“I can’t think of anything more scary or more traumatic,” the mother told police in Scottsdale, Arizona.
It was Christmas Eve 2024, and local relatives had come over to the short-term rental home to visit. The dad had fired up the grill. The mom was cooking in the kitchen. And an adult cousin and his wife played foosball on the back patio while a few kids — ages 6 and 7 — went swimming in the home's unfenced, backyard pool.
Everything seemed fine until the family’s youngest child, 1, wobbled out of the home and into the pool, unnoticed. The children who were playing in the pool didn’t seem to see the child as he sunk below the water's surface. And neither did the adults.
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“I saw him inside a minute before it probably happened,” the child’s father told police. “I literally got out of the kitchen, went to the grill...and then boom, it happened!”
“He snuck somewhere to get past us,” said the cousin. “I didn’t see him. I don’t know where he came out of.”
The baby's little legs could not keep his head afloat, and when the adults finally found him, parts of his body had turned blue.
“I’ll never get that image of him out of my head,” the mother told police.
The unexpected hero
Fortunately, one other person was in the backyard that afternoon: the child’s older brother, a two-year-old boy, who had been kicking a beachball around the perimeter of the pool.
In surveillance video obtained by Scripps News, one can see that boy eventually notices that his baby brother was not coming up for air.
“(He) came and got me,” said the adult cousin. “He tugged my shirt hard.”
The cousin told police the other brother pointed at the pool where the one-year-old was floating, face down.
“Whenever I pulled him out, man, he was...blue. I think a couple of seconds more, he would have been gone,” said the cousin who performed CPR.
He was able to restore the child’s breathing, and the boy was treated at a hospital. According to the child's mother, the boy is doing fine today.
Scottsdale police team monitors vacation rentals
“What we’ll find is families come in from other parts of the country where maybe water safety or pools aren’t nearly as prevalent,” said Jeromie O’Meara, a Scottsdale police commander who leads the city’s short-term rental team. “Now, you’ve got a family staying that maybe doesn’t have the same level of experience.”
O’Meara said the short-term rental team was formed in response to an influx of thousands of rental homes and calls to police for service at those properties.
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According to estimates from the city of Scottsdale, the city had more than 4500 short-term rental homes as of July 2025. The city estimated more than 1500 of those were unlicensed.
When a drowning occurs, O’Meara and his team work with city inspectors to make sure the short-term rental home is up to the city’s safety standards. While safety codes vary between jurisdictions, Scottsdale’s regulations require a primary barrier fence in addition to either a pool fence or an audible alarm on all doors and windows leading to the water.
To be in compliance, a property must have a primary barrier — like a 60” perimeter fence — that is “unable to be easily climbed, that prevents public access.” A gate like this must be self-closing and self-latching, according to the city’s short-term rental pool barrier requirements.
The property also must have a secondary barrier that “restricts access to the pool itself. This may be either a separate pool fence or audible alarm system on doors and windows leading to the pool area.”
“It’s just a responsibility that the community — the neighborhood — expects you to have if you’re going to move a business into the community as a short-term rental,” said O’Meara.
A violation at the house where the rescue occurred
A Scripps News investigation found records showing the pool where the little boy was rescued was in violation of city regulations by not having either a pool fence or an alarm on the doors and windows leading to the water.
An inspector found the property to be “not in compliance with the City’s pool barrier requirements for short-term vacation rentals,” and issued a Notice to Comply. Within weeks, the city said, the homeowners installed alarms on windows and doors and a self-closing pool gate.
