Girl who drowned after being sucked into ‘malfunctioning’ pipe ID’d

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An eight-year-old girl who was found dead after being sucked into a “malfunctioning” pipe in a hotel pool in Texas has been identified.

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The tragedy happened at a Houston DoubleTree as young Aliyah Jaico swam with her family in the “lazy river-style” pool on Saturday, reported KTRK-TV, according to the New York Post.

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The girl was reported missing at first, according to the outlet.

“Did she wander off? Did somebody take her or what? So anyhow, we mobilized a lot of people,” said Tim Miller, the founder of Texas EquuSearch, which was called in to help try to find the child. “We had people actually searching outside and in different rooms and everything.”

The search team initially thought she might have been abducted from the hotel.

Security footage of the pool later showed that the child had gone underwater and never resurfaced.

Her body was found after the pool was drained, and a camera was sent into one of its pipes.

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“We put them poles in there almost 20 feet, and we saw her little hand and part of her body, so we got the fire department back out there,” Miller said.

“(It) appears right now the pump was put in there, and it was probably malfunctioning because of the open pipe that she ended up in was supposed to be pushing water out,” he said.

“Many of us had to wipe tears from our eyes,” he said of the search team. “This is one of the saddest ones we’ve seen in a good while.”

It took about 13 hours to search for the girl and to recover her body.

The girl’s family has since filed a wrongful death suit against the hotel and its parent companies, accusing the parties of gross negligence that led to the child’s death, KPRC reported.

The family is seeking more than $1 million in damages.

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