An 18-month-old boy declared dead in an Arizona emergency room on Super Bowl Sunday was found alive and breathing nearly six hours later, in the hospital's cold room, where his body had been left for the medical examiner to collect.
Vincent Lorenzo Fiordilino was pulled from a family pool in Gilbert, Arizona, on February 8 after a relative found him floating face down. A 911 call went out at approximately 5:38 p.m. The relative performed CPR. The boy was rushed to Mercy Gilbert Medical Center, where an ER team worked to revive him.
By 6:20 p.m., the attending physician, Dr. A. Toosi, had called time of death and requested a moment of silence. By 7:23 p.m., the cold room door was closed. And at 11:52 p.m., when a medical examiner's team arrived to retrieve the body, they found Vincent breathing. The family was notified immediately, and the boy was airlifted to Phoenix Children's Hospital, NBC News reported.
That five-and-a-half-hour gap, between the moment a doctor declared a toddler dead and the moment someone noticed he was still alive, is the center of a case that now involves a police investigation, a hospital's internal review, and a recommended child abuse charge against the boy's parents.
A Gilbert Police Department report obtained by NBC affiliate KPNX of Phoenix lays out a minute-by-minute timeline that raises hard questions about what happened in that emergency room and why warning signs were apparently dismissed.
At 6:13 p.m., seven minutes before calling time of death, Dr. Toosi was observed checking the time on "a cell phone with a cheetah print orange and black case" before going to deliver the news to Vincent's parents. At approximately 6:20 p.m., or 18:20 hours in the police report's notation, Toosi declared the boy dead.
But the timeline did not end there.
At approximately 7:18 p.m., as ER workers prepared to move the boy from the trauma room to the cold room, a detective on scene reported hearing "another audible gasp." The word "another" suggests it was not the first. A nurse dismissed the sound. The police report states:
"The nurse again stated it was agonal breathing and explained it was due to compressions, oxygen, and possible pressure applied by family members while saying goodbye."
The cold room door closed at 7:23 p.m. Roughly an hour later, the same detective returned to photograph the body. He again observed what appeared to be a gasp or air release. No one reopened the question of whether the child was alive.
It was not until 11:52 p.m., when the medical examiner's team arrived for what should have been a routine body retrieval, that anyone confirmed the boy was breathing.
The police report captures a revealing exchange between Dr. Toosi and a Gilbert police officer who appeared to question the physician's diagnosis. Toosi's response, quoted in the report:
"Please do your thing and let me do my thing. I went to medical school for a reason."
Before declaring death, Toosi addressed the room with another line preserved in the report:
"As long as there are no objections, I'd like to call time of death."
A police officer apparently did have concerns. The doctor brushed them aside. And a toddler spent hours in a cold room set between 36 and 39 degrees while still clinging to life.
Lawyer Scott Holden, representing Dr. Toosi, issued a statement to NBC News saying the doctor could not speak freely due to patient confidentiality. Holden added:
"Because of this, as well as patient confidentiality, we are unable to make a full statement at this time other than to assure you that there is much more to this case, both factually and medically, than has been reported thus far."
What that "much more" consists of remains unexplained. Mercy Gilbert Medical Center has not disclosed whether Toosi remains on staff. The hospital acknowledged conducting an internal investigation and called the incident "a heartbreaking situation," but has not released any findings.
The Gilbert Police Department recommended that the Maricopa County Attorney's Office charge Vincent's parents with child abuse. The police report states that both parents admitted to smoking marijuana the morning of the near-drowning and flags "the potential of both parents' state of mind being impaired by marijuana and/or other mind altering substances."
The implication in the report is clear: the parents may not have noticed their 18-month-old son wandering toward the pool because they were impaired. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has not publicly announced whether it will file charges. A spokesperson for the office declined to comment on the case.
No charges have been confirmed as filed. No arrests have been confirmed. The parents remain unnamed in public reporting. When NBC News called the house where Vincent lives, a man who answered said only: "I can't comment on this right now, but thanks for calling."
Vincent survived. The Gilbert Police Department confirmed the child "ultimately survived and has been released from the hospital." But survival is a relative term for an 18-month-old who spent hours in a morgue after a near-drowning.
A crowdfunding page set up by the family states that Vincent is breathing with the assistance of a ventilator. He has avoided serious brain damage but will require ongoing medical monitoring and extensive therapy. The full scope of his long-term condition has not been disclosed.
The case leaves a stack of unanswered questions. What did Mercy Gilbert's internal investigation actually find? Was any action taken against the nurse who repeatedly attributed signs of life to residual effects of CPR? What specific standard of care was applied, or not, before a toddler was wheeled into a cold room? And why did multiple observations of gasping, noted by a police detective, fail to trigger a single re-examination by medical staff?
This case cuts in two directions, and both deserve scrutiny. If the parents were impaired when their toddler ended up face down in a pool, that is a serious failure of the most basic parental duty. The police recommendation of child abuse charges reflects that gravity. The Maricopa County Attorney's Office owes the public a timely decision.
But the hospital's failure is its own category. A police officer raised concerns about the diagnosis. A detective heard gasping, more than once. A nurse waved it off. And a doctor who told a cop to stay in his lane called time of death on a child who was not dead. That child then lay alone in a room kept near freezing for more than five hours before anyone checked again.
Mercy Gilbert Medical Center's refusal to release the results of its internal investigation, or even confirm whether the attending physician still works there, is not reassuring. It is the institutional equivalent of "no comment" dressed up as concern.
When a toddler is pronounced dead and found alive in a morgue, the public is entitled to more than a statement calling it "heartbreaking." Heartbreak is what the family experienced. What the hospital owes is an explanation, and what the justice system owes is accountability, for everyone whose failure put that child where he ended up.
A society that cannot hold adults responsible when an 18-month-old nearly dies twice in one evening, once in a pool and once on a morgue table, has stopped taking accountability seriously altogether.
