Toddler found breathing in morgue after Super Bowl pool incident

An 18-month-old boy found face-down in an in-ground pool during a Super Bowl gathering in Gilbert, Arizona, was pronounced dead at Mercy Gilbert Medical Center at 6:20 p.m. and then found breathing in the hospital morgue at 11:52 p.m., more than five hours later. Gilbert police later identified the child as Vincent Lorenzo Fiordilino and said he survived and has been released from the hospital.

The case now turns on the chain of custody from backyard rescue to emergency care to the cold room. Police records say several people at the scene and at the hospital reported that the boy appeared to be gasping for air, and officers documented what they believed were multiple signs of life before he was moved to the morgue. That timeline raises immediate questions about the exam used to declare death, the communication between clinical staff and hospital transport, and why a child with possible signs of life was ever transferred out of acute care.

Mercy Gilbert Medical Center said it conducted an internal review and called the episode heartbreaking. The physician who pronounced the child dead was identified as Aryan Toosi. The central failure in the case is not confined to one moment in the emergency department. It reaches across every handoff after the rescue, from the first assessment in the hospital to the later transfer into the morgue, where the child was discovered alive.

Police have recommended that the child’s parents be charged with child abuse and child neglect, and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office is reviewing the case. Investigators say the parents admitted to smoking marijuana that morning and alleged the couple may have been impaired and failed to supervise the toddler adequately during the party. The facts place the case at the intersection of parental supervision, pool safety and the limits of emergency response in a state where residential drowning risks remain persistent.

Doctors generally use a documented cardiopulmonary death exam before declaring death, and spontaneous return of circulation after CPR has been stopped is rare but documented. Here, the more urgent question is whether the child was correctly assessed, whether the bedside warnings about gasping and movement were fully acted on, and how a toddler could move from a hospital bed to the morgue before anyone recognized he was still breathing.