MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Police got the chilling call around 4 p.m. Thursday. It came from a woman inside a home on Dunville Road. She said a 1-year old child drowned in the tub. Police have not said if the caller was the baby’s mother.
Brittney Shanks heard the ambulance from her house down the street. “I come out here to look and see what the commotion was, and they had a stretcher,” she said.
First responders tried to save the child but couldn’t. The child’s father says the baby was a girl, but it was too hard for him to tell us anything else.
Police blocked off the area with crime scene tape and detained two woman they haven’t identified. It’s all part of the investigation into how the baby drowned.
“It’s just a sad situation,” neighbor Mark Wesley said. “The life hadn’t even got started yet, you know? And to lose it so young, and then for that mother and that family that’s pretty tough.”
Shanks is currently expecting her first child and says she can’t imagine the pain of losing a baby. “Oh my gosh, that would be very terrible. I couldn’t keep myself together. There are no words for that, honestly. Losing a child, I don’t know if I could go on if I lost my kid.”
Wesley doesn’t think the family will ever fully heal. “I don’t think that’s something you ever really get over. I think that’s something that stays with you for the rest of your life.”