7:15am | A 16-year-old honors student from Newark, N.J., visiting Long Beach with a group of classmates to compete in a robotics competition drowned late last week in the pool of the hotel where the students were staying, authorities said.
The girl was identified by family members as Shauna-Kaye Williams, who a New York television station is reporting was such a good student that she was set to graduate a year early and was already looking at colleges, including Purdue University.
Long Beach police found no evidence of foul play, a spokeswoman for the Long Beach Police Department said, and the drowning, which occurred just after 7 a.m. last Friday morning, is being considered accidental.
Long Beach Firefighter Steve Yamamoto, a fire department spokesman, said that firefighter paramedics responded to a call of an unconscious person at the Courtyard Marriott in downtown Long Beach at 7:08 a.m. Friday. They found the girl lying on the pool deck as friends attempted to revive her.
Williams was unresponsive, and paramedics could not detect a pulse. They continued to work on her, hooking her up to a heart monitor and transporting her to St. Mary’s Medical Center, where she was later pronounced dead, Yamamoto said.
The details surrounding the drowning were not clear, he said.
The county coroner was scheduled to perform an autopsy Sunday.
The students from West Side High School in Newark were in Long Beach to compete in the 2011 Season FIRST Robotics Competition, also known as LOGO MOTION at the Long Beach Arena, which took place last Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to WPIX.
The girl’s father, Carl Williams, told WPIX TV that his daughter did not know how to swim. He said that Williams and a friend snuck out of their room and headed for the hotel jacuzzi, then the pool.
“Both of them was in the pool, and her friend went to answer her phone, and when she came back, she was under the water,” Carl Williams reportedly said.
The girl’s mother, Paula Watson, who lives in Jamaica, told NJ.com that her daughter, who aspired to become a doctor, enjoyed reading, basketball and photography.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story stated that the Long Beach Police Department did not plan to investigate the drowning because it was being considered accidental. This statement failed to make clear that police did conduct an initial investigation, which led to the determination that the drowning was accidental. The Long Beach Post apologizes for any confusion this might have caused.