A heartbroken New Jersey father recalled the crushing sight of discovering his three-year-old son laying lifeless and face down in the backyard pool over the weekend.
Little Elijah Stephen slipped out of his Blackwood home on Saturday and tragically drowned in the family’s pool, according to a GoFundMe organized by the family.
The boy’s father, Michael Stephen, was in the kitchen when his “heart [sank]” after noticing the back door was left open, he said in a crushing social media post on Monday.
Stephen and his wife, Sandra “Sandi” Sheviln, raced to the backyard and saw “the worst thing any parent could see” — Elijah was face down in the pool, laying motionless with blue lips and no pulse.
“The images will forever be burned into my mind,” Stephen, a cop and military veteran, painstakingly wrote.
“I wasn’t fast enough. I failed. I will spend everyday replaying that.”
The distraught dad quickly started to perform chest compressions on his son and first responders arrived at the home within two minutes of Sheviln dialing 911.
The boy was rushed to a local hospital but due to the severity of the swelling in his brain, doctors were unable to revive him.
“Within the next few days, we are going to lose our sweet boy. Even if he were to somehow [miraculously] survive, he would have no quality of life,” Stephen wrote.
The Stephen family plans to prepare Elijah for organ donation in the coming days, the social media post read.
“If we have the ability to prevent another parent from knowing this feeling, I’ll do what I can,” he wrote.
“Elijah would want that as well.”
Stephen remembered his little boy as a “sweet and gentle soul,” adding that he was “the kind-hearted kid with a huge smile that lit the room.”
“I’ll spend the rest of my days wondering what could have been,” he painfully wrote.
“What would he have done? How Elijah could have changed the world.”
The grief-stricken dad finally issued a warning to other parents, adding that 10 minutes is all it can take to “change your life.”
“Don’t ever take it for granted. Hug your babies. Hug them longer, hug them tighter,” he added.
“You never know when it will be the last.”
