The mother of a toddler who drowned in a pool in March was jailed in connection with her death on Tuesday.
Online records show Caitlin Powell, 30, of Lutz was arrested and charged with aggravated manslaughter. She was booked into the Orient Road Jail and released on a $15,000 bond.
According to an arrest report, Powell was asleep when her 3-year-old daughter Jasmine slipped through an unlocked sliding door and fell into an algae-filled pool where she later died.
Around 9:45 p.m. on March 10, Powell, who is a bartender, arrived at her place of employment and took one 15 milligram pill of morphine, prescribed by her doctor. Two hours later she took another half pill. She also drank four to five shots of Bailey’s Irish Cream and butterscotch liqueur.
Around 2:40 a.m., she picked her two children up from a friend’s house and drove to her home in the 17500 block of Willow Pond Drive and put the children to sleep. Powell woke up twice to use the restroom and change Jasmine’s diapers.
Around 12:15 p.m., Powell was awoken by one of her children who informed her Jasmine was in the pool. An hour later, the child was pronounced dead at Florida Hospital Tampa.
According to the report, the pool was heavily ridden with green algae and it was hard to see past the first step.
Investigators suspect Powell was aware the sliding doors that led to the pool did not lock properly and that a safety pin that binds the doors together had been missing for a couple of weeks, the report claims. The bar she had used to secure the door was later found in the backyard under a shovel.
The front of the pool was fenced in, but investigators found a gap in the fence that was blocked by a lightweight metal cage and a plastic pet cage.
The other child told detectives the toddler had pushed through the metal cage and carrier, then walked around the pool and fell into the water.
“By the defendant’s own statement, the children were unsupervised for four and a half hours,” the report says.
The medical examiner could not determine the child’s time of death.
