Drowning victim identified as 6-year-old Howland boy

The Braceville fire chief was the first responder to a drowning Saturday.

STAFF WRITER

WARREN — Police have identified the 6-year-old boy who drowned Saturday evening in a private swimming pool in Warren Township as Michael Stokes of Howland.

Calling hours and funeral services for the boy, the son of Mitch and Kristy Stokes, will be today at Staton-Borowski Funeral Home on North Road. Calling hours will be 2 to 4 and 5 to 7 p.m., followed by the funeral at 7.

The boy would have been a first-grader at Howland Glen Elementary School.

He was with other members of his Cub Scout troop and their parents at a Scouts planning meeting at a home on North Leavitt Road when he was found in the pool and pulled out.

He had been swimming throughout the day, but his mother thought he had gone to the house to change out of his swimming suit when someone discovered him at the bottom of the pool, township police said.

Plenty of adults were sitting on a deck attached to the pool, but nobody saw the boy go into the water, police Lt. Don Bishop said.

During a phone call to 911 at 7:08 p.m., a dispatcher was advised that the boy had been removed from the pool and was breathing, but that he should be “checked,” according to dispatch records at Lordstown Police Department.

The department handles calls for Warren Township.

Another 911 call came in nine minutes later, at 7:17 p.m., with the information that the boy was not breathing now, his lips were blue and someone at the house was doing chest compressions on him.

The first emergency personnel to arrive at the house was Braceville Fire Chief Don Maffitt Jr., at 7:19 p.m., followed by volunteers with Warren Township Fire Department at 7:22 p.m.

Maffitt heard the call about the drowning and assisted because he could tell that Warren Township’s fire department was busy on another call, said Warren Township Fire Chief Kenneth Schick.

Maffitt and the other paramedics were unable to revive the boy, and he was pronounced dead later at Forum Health Trumbull Memorial Hospital.

Schick said all ambulance personnel working at the time had been called from the fire station on West Market Street for a car rollover on North River Road west of Mahoning Avenue at 7:05 p.m. A victim was transported to the hospital from the rollover, Schick said.

With the paid part-time firefighters on that call, a call went out to the department’s volunteers, who assembled at the Dover Street fire station south of Warren to respond to the drowning, Schick said.

The ambulance containing the volunteers arrived eight minutes after leaving the Dover Street station, 911 records show.

Schick said having to respond to the drowning with volunteers from the Dover Street station over four miles from the emergency did slow response time compared with traveling less than a mile from the West Market Street firehouse to the drowning.

He said the information received at the 911 center didn’t have any bearing on the response time, however.

Knowing that a child was “in the water” would have made the call the highest priority, and all available personnel would have responded at full speed, Schick said.

Bishop said he was working a side job at the time of the drowning, and he and the two Warren Township police officers working that night were busy trying to track down a suspect in a wooded area at North Leavitt Road and Mahoning Avenue when the drowning call came in.

He didn’t know there was a drowning call until after the boy was pronounced dead, he said.

runyan@vindy.com