Florida mother whose sons, aged 5 and 6, drowned after being left in pool for two hours charged with manslaughter
NORTH LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA: The mother of two young boys who drowned in a North Lauderdale swimming pool has been arrested in connection to their deaths, nearly four months after the tragic incident.
The Broward Sheriff's Office has arrested 23-year-old Wildline Liline Joseph of Lauderhill, for the deaths of her two sons, five-year-old Branario Minto and six-year-old Ja'Kye Joseph, last week, according to court records obtained by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The two boys were found unresponsive in the community pool at Silver Palms Condominiums located at 1200 S.W. 52nd Avenue by a relative at around 9.30 pm on May 22. The relative pulled the boys from the pool and started CPR before calling 911 for help.
North Lauderdale Fire Rescue responded to the scene and transported the boys to Northwest Medical Center in Margate, where they were pronounced dead.
Surveillance video from the scene showed that the boys had been playing in the pool area about two hours before they were found. They were unsupervised, with detectives theorizing that they possibly climbed over the fence surrounding the apartment to get to the pool.
The sheriff's office said they arrested Wildline this week because they determined that she "failed to provide proper care and supervision for the brothers."
This is not the mother's first run-in with authorities either. The Miami Herald reported that the Department of Children and Families investigated the 23-year-old's life more than a dozen times, beginning from when she was a child.
Between 2008 and 2013, the DCF received six separate maltreatment reports when she was a child. However, she was not taken away from her mother, who was referred to a community behavioral health provider instead.
Then, when Wildline became a mother, Branario and Ja'Kye were taken away from her because she was high on Flakka, a synthetic drug, while the five-year-old was in the hospital recovering from a seizure.
At the time, the two boys were handed over to their maternal grandmother, the same woman who had been accused of mistreating Wildline on multiple occasions. They eventually ended up in foster care, though they did make their way back to their mother several months later.
Between 2015 and 2019, the DCF went on to investigate seven reports that the boys had been abused or neglected, with the last one coming just two days before they drowned. Wildline has been charged with two counts of aggravated manslaughter of a child in connection to their deaths.
Her boyfriend, 24-year-old John Louis Lynn Jr., has also been arrested on the same charges. While he is not the biological father to either boy, he was living with her at the time of their drowning and is the father to at least one of two other children at the home.
The Broward Sheriff's Office Child Protective Investigators Section had removed those two children, a four-month-old and a one-year-old, from the home in May as part of their investigation.
Wildline is being held in the Broward County Main Jail on bonds totaling $500,000. Lynn is being held without bond because of unrelated charges he's facing.