Drowning Is the #1 Killer of Arizona's Youngest Children

The Arizona Department of Health Services reviews every child who dies in this state. A panel reads the file, reconstructs what happened, and answers one question above all the others: could this death have been prevented?

For child drownings, the answer keeps coming back the same. Yes. Every time.

In 2024, Arizona’s Child Fatality Review Program reviewed 36 child drowning deaths. It judged 100% of them preventable. It did the same for the 31 deaths in 2023, and the 30 in 2022. Three years running, the people whose job is to study how Arizona’s children die have concluded that not one of these drownings had to happen.

That finding is where this report lives.

The Headline the State Won’t Put on a Billboard

Drowning was the leading cause of death for Arizona children ages 1 through 4 in both 2023 and 2024. Not a leading cause. The leading cause, ahead of disease, ahead of every other category the reviewers track.

The 2024 numbers are stark on their own. Of the 36 children who drowned, 75% were under age 5. Three out of four died in a pool, hot tub, or spa. The statewide child drowning mortality rate climbed to 2.2 per 100,000 children, up from 1.9 the year before. And the reviewers judged every one of those 36 deaths preventable.

Set against the national picture, Arizona’s rate is nearly double. The CDC’s most recent published national rate for unintentional drowning across all ages runs around 1.2 to 1.4 per 100,000. Arizona’s 2024 child rate of 2.2 per 100,000 sits well above that. The exact multiplier shifts with the age group and year you compare, so the honest framing is the one the data supports directly: Arizona’s children drown at nearly double the national rate.

A note on the table. The 2022 column carries the figure that travels widest in news coverage: a lapse in supervision was identified as a factor in 97% of that year’s child drowning deaths. That 97% is real, but it belongs to 2022. The most recent figure, for 2024, is 81%. Across the three most recent review years, a lapse in supervision was a factor in 81% to 97% of Arizona child drowning deaths. The pattern is the story. The single number depends on the year.

What “Preventable” Means in the File

When the review program calls a death preventable, it is making a specific finding, not a moral judgment. It means the panel identified a concrete intervention, a barrier, a layer of supervision, a swim skill, that would have changed the outcome. The most common gap it names is supervision.

That word does heavy lifting in a legal context. A drowning is fast and silent. A toddler can slip through an open door, cross a yard, and be in the water in under a minute, with no splash and no cry to mark it. The review program’s finding that supervision lapsed in 81% of 2024 cases is not an accusation that parents were careless. It is a description of how thin the margin is, and of how much rides on the layers that are supposed to catch a lapse before it turns fatal.

The most important of those layers is a fence.

The Pool-Barrier Law: A.R.S. 36-1681

Arizona wrote the duty into statute. A.R.S. 36-1681 governs pool enclosures, and it applies to any swimming pool or contained body of water deeper than 18 inches and wider than 8 feet that is intended for swimming.

The statute is specific about what a compliant barrier looks like.

The statute carves out exceptions, including agricultural structures, public and semi-public pools, pools built before the law took effect, residences where every occupant is age 6 or older, and jurisdictions with local ordinances at least as strict. A violation is charged as a petty offense, and the penalty can be waived if the owner installs a compliant barrier within 45 days and completes a pool safety course.

That petty-offense label undersells the law’s reach. In a civil case, a violation of A.R.S. 36-1681 can establish negligence, because the statute sets a standard of care the legislature already decided was reasonable. The barrier requirement is not just a code item. It is the line the state drew between a private hazard and a public duty.

Local codes can draw that line tighter. Unincorporated Maricopa County, under its 2018 building-code additions, requires a 60-inch barrier, a 54-inch latch, gates that swing away from the pool, and a separate barrier between any door that opens directly onto the pool and the water itself. Property owners should confirm the rule that governs their exact address, because the jurisdiction, not the statewide floor, sets the controlling standard.

When the Hazard Belongs to Someone Else: Attractive Nuisance

A pool is the textbook example of what the law calls an attractive nuisance: a manmade condition that draws young children who are too little to understand the danger.

Arizona has adopted Section 339 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, the framework that governs these cases. It can make a property owner liable when a trespassing child is harmed by an artificial condition, even though the same owner would owe an adult trespasser almost nothing. The doctrine turns on five elements:

1. The owner maintains an artificial condition, like a pool, that the owner knows or has reason to know is likely to attract children.
2. The owner knows or should know the condition poses a substantial risk of serious harm to children.
3. Because of their youth, the children cannot appreciate the danger.
4. The burden of eliminating the danger is slight compared to the risk to children.
5. The owner failed to exercise reasonable care to protect the children.

The fourth element is where the pool-barrier statute and the common-law doctrine meet. A fence is cheap measured against a child’s life, and the legislature already set the standard for what an adequate one looks like. When a child wanders to a neighbor’s unfenced pool and drowns, the attractive nuisance framework asks whether that owner did the little it would have taken to prevent it.

Wrongful Death and the Clock: A.R.S. 12-611, 12-612, and the Two-Year Window

When a child drowns because of someone else’s failure, Arizona’s wrongful death statutes set out who can sue and on what theory.

A.R.S. 12-611 creates the cause of action. Liability attaches when a death is caused by a wrongful act, neglect, or default that would have supported a damages claim had the person survived, and it attaches even if the same conduct also amounts to a homicide.

A.R.S. 12-612 names who may bring the claim: a surviving spouse, a child, a parent or guardian, or the personal representative of the deceased. Either parent can sue for the death of a child, and damages are distributed in proportion to each party’s loss. The statute disqualifies anyone convicted of child abuse causing the death or of a homicide offense, treating that person as having predeceased the child so they cannot profit from the death.

Then there is the deadline. Arizona gives families two years to file a wrongful death claim under A.R.S. 12-542, and for a fatal injury that clock runs from the date of death. A parent bringing a wrongful death claim is not a minor, so the parent’s two-year window opens at the date of the child’s death and does not wait.

Prevention Is the Thing the State Keeps Underlining

Every CFRP annual report lands on the same conclusion: these deaths are preventable, and the layers that prevent them are known. The reviewers’ own findings point to where the gaps are.

In 2024, among pool drowning cases where a barrier was supposed to be in place, the most frequently breached barriers were fences and doors, and a large share of the fence breaches involved no fence at all. In 2023, the pattern was even sharper: the overwhelming majority of fence breaches that year involved no fence present. The statute that requires a 5-foot barrier exists precisely because the absence of one is the recurring fact in the files.

The defenses stack. A compliant, self-latching barrier between the house and the pool. Doors and windows that a toddler cannot open onto open water. An adult assigned, by name, to watch the water with nothing else competing for their attention. Swim skills for children old enough to learn them. No single layer is a guarantee. The point of layering is that a lapse in one is caught by the next, which is the whole logic behind the review program’s finding that a supervision lapse, the failure of one layer, was a factor in most deaths rather than the only cause.

The Disproportion the Data Won’t Let Go

One finding in the reviews deserves its own line. In 2024, Black children made up 22% of Arizona’s child drowning deaths while making up about 5% of the child population, a roughly fourfold overrepresentation. The 2023 figures were close to the same. This tracks a national pattern documented by the CDC, and it does not trace to anything about the children. It traces to structural gaps: unequal access to swim lessons, unequal access to safe water settings, and the downstream effects of poverty. A prevention strategy that ignores who is dying disproportionately is not a complete one.

What the Record Establishes

Strip the report to its load-bearing facts and this is what Arizona’s own reviewers have put on the record. Drowning is the leading killer of this state’s youngest children. The 2024 count of 36 is the highest in the three most recent years reviewed, up from 31 in 2023 and 30 in 2022. Three out of four victims were under 5, and three out of four died in a pool or spa. A supervision lapse was a factor in most deaths, and a missing or breached barrier was the recurring physical fact. And in every year reviewed, the panel concluded that 100% of these deaths were preventable.

The state already wrote the standard of care into A.R.S. 36-1681. Arizona courts already recognize that a pool is an attractive nuisance and that the duty can reach a trespassing child. The wrongful death statutes already say who can hold a responsible party to account, and the clock to do it is short. The law, in other words, is not the gap. The gap is the fence that was never built, the gate that did not latch, the minute no one was watching the water. Arizona’s reviewers have been saying it plainly for years: not one of these children had to drown.