Police say a man fell asleep in a Florida hotel pool while the 3-year-old boy he was watching struggled to stay afloat and finally drowned.
The boy was in the pool when a hotel maid saw him and ran to help him. She pulled him out. Police say the man, 40-year-old Sharef Omar Smith, wouldn’t help the worker and finally turned to her and said, “F— you, b—.”
The event took place at the Quality Inn in Palm Bay around 11 a.m. on Saturday. As the maid cleaned a room on the third floor, she looked down and saw a boy floating in the pool. A probable cause arrest document said she ran down and yelled at Smith, “Grab the baby!” Smith is said to have been sleeping in the pool on the steps and not moving. The staff member pulled the boy, whose name was written in the report as KS, out of the water.
It was said that the boy was “lifeless.”
Police say the maid “begged” Smith to help her even though she didn’t know CPR but tried to get the boy to breathe. Smith woke up in the end, but police said he just “stood there not doing anything.”
“She said she yelled at him over and over to do something, but he wouldn’t help.” The lawsuit said, “She said he finally looked at her and said, ‘F— you, b—,’ and then kept swearing while she held on to KS.”
Smith is said to have kept yelling at other workers as they came out to help and called 911. Police said he had a bottle of wine in his bag and in his hotel room, and his breath smelt like being drunk. The affidavit also says that Smith did not cooperate with the cops.
The boy was taken to one hospital right away and then flown to another, but he died there.
The child’s mother told police that Smith wasn’t drunk when she left the room around 10 a.m., but she “knows him to be a heavy drinker and has had many DUIs,” the police wrote. Smith called her after she checked out of the hotel to ask where the boy’s bathroom suit was. But, the statement said, she didn’t want Smith to take him to the pool because he is “careless.”
One of the officers at the hospital heard Smith’s mother yelling at him on the phone for being “drunk again,” according to the police report.
It was shown on motel security video that the boy was “drowning for approximately 20 to 23 minutes in front of the defendant who was asleep in the pool,” according to the complaint.
Smith is accused of kidnapping and killing a child in a dangerous way. He has no bond and is being held at the Brevard County Jail.
