Autistic children are drowning in Florida stormwater ponds. What can be done?

The boy walking in the road appeared to be 5 years old but wore diapers and a T-shirt.

“Pull over,” Melinda Dryer told her sister as they drove through a Port St. Lucie suburb on a Saturday morning coffee run. “Something’s not right.”

A driver heading the opposite direction narrowly missed the boy, Dryer told the Tampa Bay Times. She got out of the car and approached.

“Hey, are you OK?” Dryer recalled asking, bending to the boy’s level. “Where’s your parents?”

He stared blankly ahead and said nothing. Then he walked forward and jumped from the pavement into a stormwater retention pond next to the sidewalk.

Dryer and others struggled to help the boy out of the pond. Media reports later identified him as autistic.

In Florida, children with autism made up about 5% of the youth population between 2023 and 2024, the most recent time frame for which data is available from the Florida Department of Health. They accounted for 21% of childhood drowning deaths in Florida last year and a quarter of all Florida childhood drowning deaths in 2024, according to data from the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Of the 88 children who have drowned in Florida so far this year, 12 had autism, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Florida law requires barriers like fencing around residential swimming pools. No barrier requirements exist for stormwater retention ponds. An estimated 75,000 dot the peninsula, and the number increases with new land developments, said Eban Bean, a University of Florida professor who studies urban water resources.

Apartment complexes must be built above the 100-year floodplain, so developers frequently excavate retention ponds and use the soil to elevate nearby land.

The unpaved ponds collect rainwater to prevent flooding and protect water quality. They also serve a third purpose: “You’ve got a waterfront property right there that you can sell at a premium,” Bean said.

Children with autism are drawn to water, too, which poses a threat when they’re prone to wandering off, or “eloping.”

The day before Dryer saw the boy leap into the pond, Hillsborough deputies found another boy dead in a retention pond. The 5-year-old, who also had autism, broke through a screen door in his family’s Tampa apartment and made for a pond about 30 feet away.

On June 13, another autistic boy the same age drowned in a retention pond at the same complex.

“It’s like a mini-epidemic,” said Guohua Li, a Columbia University professor who, in 2017, wrote the first study quantifying drowning risk associated with autism. His research found that children with autism are 160 times more likely to drown than their neurotypical peers.

Rules ‘are not being followed’

After he leapt from the sidewalk, the boy in Port St. Lucie landed in an ankle-deep pond. He lay in the water, splashing and playing. When his shirt and diaper got wet, Dryer said, he freaked out and took them off.

“No, no, no, don’t drink it, don’t drink it,” Dryer told him as she and others who gathered at the pond coaxed him out before police arrived.

Good Samaritans were not around in April 2025 to save 3-year-old Kyrie Larry from the retention pond he drowned in near his family’s Palm Harbor apartment.

Kyrie was autistic and nonverbal. He wandered past three buildings to a pond in Bell Lansbrook Village. His parents, who are both deaf, didn’t hear him leave.

“The pond in the apartment complex should’ve had a fence,” Kyrie’s father, Marcus Larry, said through an American Sign Language interpreter at a June 2025 news conference. “It should’ve been more secure. But it was not — and now he’s gone.”

The family sued the companies that own and manage the apartment complex, Bell Partners and Bell Value-Add Fund, as well as Pinellas County.

The Southwest Florida Water Management District governs how steep the land leading up to a retention pond can be. For every 4 feet of embankment, its slope can only decline 1 foot, said Bean, the University of Florida professor.

If the slope is steeper, property owners must erect a 6-foot chain-link fence or other barrier “sufficient to prevent accidental incursion, the district’s rules state.

“The crux of the issue is even the rules that are implemented are not being followed,” Maegan Bridwell, an attorney for the Larrys, told the Times last week. Property owners are in the best position to fix the issue, she added.

Bell Partners and a spokesperson for Pinellas County declined to comment on the Larrys’ lawsuit, citing the pending litigation.

No one from the water management district can talk to the Times about the rule or how it enforces it, spokesperson Susanna Martinez Tarokh said in an email, because they have been sued over side-slope requirements in the past and might be sued again in the future.

“Our ability to comment publicly on this topic is limited,” she said.

Homeowners resist fences and foliage

For the last eight years, Stacey Hoaglund has advocated for legislation to improve water safety for children with autism. This year is the first time she is working on a measure mandating barriers around retention ponds.

“We already know there’s going to be resistance,” said Hoaglund, who spent a decade as the president of the Autism Society of Florida and now serves as president of Disability Advocacy and Support Specialists, a not-for-profit.

Hoaglund knows fencing every pond and lake in Florida is unrealistic. But targeting certain apartment complexes, including those with homeowners associations and those that are not retirement communities, could find a warmer reception in Tallahassee, she said.

A separate effort to prevent erosion in retention ponds could make them less dangerous. Over time, erosion at the edge of a pond turns steady slopes into steep drop-offs.

“If someone does fall in, it’s hard for them to get out,” said Michelle Atkinson, an environmental horticulturist with the University of Florida.

Atkinson helps communities add vegetation to pond shorelines. Plants, particularly those with deep root systems, keep soil in place.

Homeowners who fancy a pond view resist these ecological efforts. For them, Atkinson recommends low-growing plants, but taller vegetation could prevent children from seeing, and thus being attracted to, the water.

Creating a buffer zone of plants could also benefit maintenance workers. Over the past 11 years, two men have died in retention ponds in Manatee County when their lawn mowers flipped upside down, pinning them under water, Atkinson said. The foliage also catches trash, making it easier to collect.

Short of tackling retention ponds, parents can install locks designed to thwart children. The Florida Drowning Prevention Foundation also gives out free door alarms to notify parents when a child leaves.

Florida’s Department of Health offers swim lesson vouchers for children in need. This year, Hoaglund successfully lobbied lawmakers to increase the age of eligibility from 4 to 7.

About 40 state lawmakers this year have personal connections to people with autism, Hoaglund said. With a new batch set to take office in January, legislative appetite for water safety efforts remains to be seen.

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(Times staff writer Alexa Coultoff contributed to this story.)

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