Boy's death casts a pall over summer

Within hours, the storm drain was surrounded with flowers.
By STEPHEN SIFF
and PEGGY SINKOVICH
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- All it takes is a good, hard summer rain and a dozen boys on bikes will materialize at Clermont and Cornell avenues N.E.
Against common sense, and warnings from neighbors who must seem crotchety, the children splash through a temporary lake in a grassy lot and leap over the ditch that becomes a raging river.
Ten-year-old John Keytack drowned in that ditch at 2 p.m. Monday, sucked by raging water into a storm drain about 3 feet below the surrounding lawns.
The boy was unconscious when firefighters freed him from the drain's grating. He was declared dead at Forum Health Trumbull Memorial Hospital, nursing supervisor Sandy Ross said.
Tried to save him
"He put up a fight," his father, John Keytack, said. "They got his heart going again, but then it would quit. He tried to hang in there, but he had been through too much."
Keytack, fighting back tears as he talked, said he will never recover.
"I'm destroyed," Keytack said. "He was my life, my little boy. He should be here right now, right next to me, watching cartoons."
The honor student at Sts. Peter and Paul School was to start fifth grade next month, Keytack said. He noted that his son loved to play video games and be outside with his friends.
"We couldn't wait for the rain to come so we could play," said Bradley Newsome, 14, who tried with three other boys to keep young John's head above water and pull him free of the slurping drain. John was slippery, and the water was pulling too hard, he said.
"The hands kept slipping," Bradley said, standing a few hours later by the grate, its water then drained.
"How could there have been an open storm drain for a child to be sucked into?" questioned Keytack. "This just isn't right. This shouldn't have happened. He was one block from our home."
Within a few hours of the accident, the drain was surrounded with bouquets and cut flowers, and in one neighborhood, the innocence of summer was gone.
Neighbor's warning
For at least 35 years, children have been playing in that spot, said Irene Stark, who lives right on the corner.
"They don't understand," she said. "You yell at them, then they come back."
The whole block regularly floods, when runoff from the Warren Plaza and Elm Road Twin Drive-In pours down a slight incline and tries to get into the storm drain where John died, just within Warren city limits.
She and other neighbors say they have complained -- to the city, to township trustees, to the city health department. By nightfall Monday, city workers had covered the drain with metal plates.
"It is a shame it took a death," said John Curto, who lives around the corner.
While the boys tried to pull John from the drain, Josh Unger, 10, ran to a neighbor's house for help.
The police and fire department arrived too late. John, of Bonnie Brae, was taken by ambulance to Trumbull Memorial, where he was pronounced dead.
XContributor: Associated Press