Child dies from suffocation, not drowning

It sounded like a pretty straight forward case of a baby drowning, but the postmortem on one year old William Cuellar from Lord’s Bank shows he didn’t die from water in his lungs. Instead the cause of death is being listed as suffocation because the medical examiner Dr. Mario Estradabran has determined the child choked on some food he had been chewing which was forced into his windpipe when he fell into a bucket of water. There was also evidence of trauma to his head from the fall. Yesterday one of the older children told News Five that the one year old and a three year old had been left in the care of their eleven year old sister while their mother Modesta Zelaya was in Belize City. Today, as police investigate to see whether or not they will charge Zelaya with manslaughter by negligence, an anonymous caller told News Five that the children were not left unsupervised but that two of the mother’s adult brothers were there at the time. If this is true then the question is: where were they when the baby fell into the bucket? Later in this newscast, we will have more on preventing such accidents, as well as a demonstration on cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR.