4-Year-Old Drowned in Bathtub While Parents Shopped, Officials Allege

Officials said a Minnesota couple allegedly left their two young children unsupervised when their 4-year-old drowned earlier this week. (Hennepin County Jail

County prosecutors said a Minnesota couple allegedly left their two young children unsupervised when their 4-year-old drowned earlier this week.

Sabina Pierre Louis, 25, and her husband, 54-year-old Eddy Pierre Louis, were charged with second-degree manslaughter for neglect of a child, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said in a Sept. 24 news release.

Police officers in Bloomington, where the family lived, were sent to the Fairview Southdale Hospital at around 10:20 a.m. on Sept. 21 for the death of 4-year-old Asher Pierre Louis. The parents were at the hospital along with their 9-year-old son when police arrived.

Eddy Louis told “police that he went to Cub Foods after 8 a.m. and when he returned to the apartment, he and his wife went to their apartment storage room,” according to the news release.

Hennepin County, Minnesota Google Maps

They then spotted their 4-year-old child floating in the bathtub as the water was running, according to the complaint.

Eddy attempted to perform CPR before driving to the hospital, said Hennepin County officials.

Sabina Pierre Louis allegedly told police a similar story. However, police noticed there were “enough inconsistencies” to prompt an investigation, the news release said.

Surveillance footage showed the couple arriving at a Walmart at around 8 a.m. before leaving about 45 minutes later, officials said. They then went to a Cub Foods store and stayed there until 9:32 a.m.

With driving time, prosecutors said they left the two children unsupervised for about two hours.

“When confronted with the evidence, Eddy and Sabina admitted they did not tell the truth when they were first interviewed,” the release said.

Prosecutors said they were told that the two children were asleep when the couple left together to the two stores and were under the impression that the two would sleep until they arrived home.

But “when they returned, the oldest child was still sleeping, but they heard the four-year-old in the bathroom, went in and discovered the baby in the tub, according to the complaint,” officials said.

Prosecutors didn’t release any further details about the case.

Bloomington is a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.