Girl, 8, Drowns After Getting Sucked Into 1-Foot-Wide Pipe In Hotel Pool

An eight-year-old girl drowned after getting sucked into a small pipe at a hotel pool in Houston, Texas, on Saturday (March 23). The girl was reported missing by her parents just before 10 p.m., and authorities called in search teams to look for her.

"Did she wander off? Did somebody take her, or what? So, anyhow, we mobilized a lot of people. We had people actually searching outside and in different rooms and everything," Tim Miller, founder of Texas EquuSearch, told KTRK.

After reviewing surveillance camera footage from the pool, the search teams discovered that she went under the water but never resurfaced.

After an initial search of four different foot-wide pipes, they could not locate the girl. They drained the pool, then attached a camera to a long pole and used it to get a view deep inside the pipes, where they made a tragic discovery.

"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 took firefighters around 13 hours to retrieve the girl's body from the pipe.

An investigation revealed that the pipe was sucking in water instead of pumping it into the pool. It is unclear why the pipe was reversed. The Houston Police Department has launched an investigation into the girl's death.

"I never, ever thought in a million years it was going to end up as bad as it ended up, so I don't know, there is a grieving family out there, and it is going to be a long, painful healing process over this one," Miller said.