TRENTON — A surveillance video that recorded a 3-year-old drowning in a city pool last summer shows the child frantically flailing to stay above water while swimmers splash around him obliviously and a lifeguard chats with a girl at poolside some 20 feet away.

The harrowing black and white footage of little Darren Horton Jr.’s futile fight to stay afloat in the city-owned Roberto Clemente pool last July was released to The Times by an attorney who has filed a wrongful death suit against the city and its pool program on behalf of Horton’s mother.

“This is one of the worst examples of life-guarding I’ve ever seen,” said attorney James Curran. “A 3-year-old boy struggled for his life in a crowded pool with a lifeguard catching a rap with a girl less than 25 feet away from him.”

The little boy who was six months shy of his fourth birthday, survived on a ventilator for four days before he died.

The civil suit, recently filed in Mercer County Superior Court, charges the city, its pool administrators and the six lifeguards on-duty that day with negligence.

This suit is about the conscious pain and suffering Horton endured before he died, Curran said. “Here we have a 3-year-old child suffering in terror for his life, struggling to breathe for maybe five minutes before he died. That’s what this case is about.”

Pool rules require that every child younger than 11 years old be accompanied by an adult to the city’s public pools. Horton was at the Academy Street pool that day with a neighbor who had brought several children to swim, Curran said.

The video released to The Times is a condensed version of the panning footage recorded by the pool’s video camera. Its time stamp indicates that Horton struggled about four minutes before sinking to the bottom of the pool.

A 6-year-old cousin can then be seen fishing his limp body from the bottom. The scene plays out in front of an empty lifeguard stand.

Earlier in the video, Horton’s arms and legs flail wildly and his body bobs up and down in the water as a lifeguard sits across the pool under an umbrella talking with a girl sitting next to him.

The lifeguard has been identified by police as 23-year-old Reinaldo Lasalde, Curran said.

“He’s chatting with a girl in a bathing suit while the poor kid drowns,” he said. “He’s not even facing the shallow end of the pool.”

Mercer County prosecutors investigated the drowning and viewed the video but declined to file any criminal charges in the case.

“Was it negligence? Absolutely, 100 percent,” said Assistant Prosecutor Brian McCauley.

“He didn’t pay attention and the kid drowned. Does it rise to the level of a criminal act? We had no evidence to support that.”

The city legal department did not return a phone call seeking a comment on the lawsuit.

Curran said his investigation indicates that all the lifeguards on duty that day were properly certified by the American Red Cross but failed to follow even the most rudimentary standards of lifeguarding.

“They’re supposed to be sitting in an elevated chair scanning the pool constantly,” he said.

“The video indicates the lifeguards were not in the elevated chairs and none of the guards appeared to be paying attention to the shallow end of the pool at all. It’s an outrageous example of an unobserved drowning. At no time did any lifeguard see this kid struggling and try to save him.”

Curran said supervisors at the pool should have taken immediate steps to see that guards took their posts in the unoccupied elevated chairs.

“This was a system-wide, multi-level failure to properly monitor the pool,” he said.

The suit, which also charges the defendants with child endangerment, seeks unspecified punitive damages.

“I’m devastated by this loss,” said the child’s mother, Ayanna Johnson.

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