A Queens mom turned away from her toddler daughter for only a few moments – but it was just long enough for the little girl to climb into her family’s backyard swimming pool and drown, cops said yesterday.
At around 10:30 a.m., the mother of three – identified by neighbors as Penny Annecco – was doing housework when she went to the bathroom in her family’s newly renovated two-story home.
Then she noticed that Jolie Annecco, 2, was missing, neighbors said.
She found the pajama-clad toddler at the bottom of the swimming pool behind their home. Jolie would have had to climb a ladder to get into the 4-foot-deep pool, the neighbors said.
Retired firefighter Steve Lancelot, who lives across the street from the Ozone Park home, ran to the back yard after hearing the mom’s screams.
“I heard her scream my name – ‘Steve, please help me,’ ” he recounted.
“I ran out of the house, and I found the baby in the yard. She was vomiting and spitting out water, and I thought there was a little hope there.”
“The mother was screaming, ‘Please tell me she’s not dead.’ ”
He tried desperately to revive the girl. “I tried to save this baby’s life, and I couldn’t,” a distraught Lancelot said.
Another neighbor, Diane Colucciello, rushed to the scene with him. “Please, Steve, make her breathe,” she quoted Annecco as saying.
Lancelot kept up the CPR for 10 minutes. “It didn’t work,” he said, breaking down in tears.
Jolie was rushed to Jamaica Hospital, where she was declared dead. Police called the drowning an accident.
Annecco and her husband, Joey, have two other daughters – Ryan, 6, and Nicky, 4.
The couple helps throw a block party in the neighborhood every year, and Joey Annecco has coached the local Little League. Neighbors said the dad is a maintenance worker in city schools. He was at work at the time of the tragedy.
Jolie’s death was the latest misfortune visited upon the Anneccos. A few years ago, their house was badly damaged in a fire, and one of their daughters is ill or disabled, neighbors said.
“They’ve had just one thing after another,” said neighbor Ann Calise.
“You have to have 100 eyes, and sometimes that’s not enough,” Calise said. “Children will be children.”
Though the city doesn’t require permits for small, above-ground pools like the one in which Jolie drowned, it does require any pool deeper than 18 inches to be surrounded by a 4-foot-tall, child-proof fence with a self-closing gate.
It is not clear whether the Anneccos were in compliance.
That rule is in line with federal Consumer Product Safety Commission standards, which further suggest that steps and ladders to above-ground pools be secured or removed when the pool is not being used.