Ruth Gali and Selah Gali, Holtsville sisters drown after mother Sudha Gali falls asleep as the 2 year old and 4 year old girls are found drowned at a pond behind the family home in Long Island.
A Long Island family is reeling after a 4 year old girl and her two year old sister drowned in a pond behind their home in Holtsville over the weekend.
Sisters, 4-year-old Ruth Gali and 2-year-old Selah Gali, lost their lives Saturday after drowning in a pond near their home at the Fairfield townhouses in Holtsville, a hamlet in Suffolk County located approximately 50 miles from NYC‘s Manhattan.
A maintenance worker found the siblings in the water after their mother, Sudha Gali, who neighbors say fell asleep, had reported them missing.
‘I saw the mother outside. I had my kitchen window open. She was calling for her children,’ neighbor Marge Baldi told ABC7NY.
Telling CBS News, ‘The mother was frantic looking for them, and the whole neighborhood came out. We were all looking for them.
How do these things happen? That’s why they’re called tragic accidents. They have a gate, they have all the safety precautions. I’ve never seen the children left unattended.’
‘I didn’t go in the water, I stayed up here, trying to help the little girl,’ 14 year old Bella Baldi told ABC7NY.
Bella tried giving the 2 year old sister CPR, but to no avail.
‘I was trying to tell people what to do to walk them through, but everybody was so frightened and scared so I started to do CPR a little bit and I checked the little girl’s pulse and I didn’t feel any,’ she said.
The teen said EMS quickly arrived and took over.
Both Selah and her big sister Ruth were rushed to Stony Brook University Hospital, but it was too late, with both girls declared deceased.
Not immediately clear is how long the girls were in the water before their bodies were recovered.
Sections of the pond are fenced, but others with a more natural habitat are not. Signage tells people to keep out of the water, stating, ‘No swimming or diving permitted in this area.’
The tragedy comes as the children’s father, David Gali, has been stuck in India over visa issues, and has been trying to get home.
According to some residents, the child’s mother put her daughters down for a nap before she – and the grandmother who also lives with the family – fell asleep.
The girl’s mother has since maintained that she never fell asleep.
To date it remained unclear how the siblings were able to leave the family premises and make their way into the pond.
The family’s church has since set up a fundraiser.
Both girls would have been celebrating their birthdays in the coming weeks.
