Kaitlyn Wages feels a stab to her heart whenever she hears about a child drowning in a backyard swimming pool.
She was horrified when she saw reports that Trigg, the three-year-old son of influencer Emilie Kiser died in just such a tragic accident on May 18 and similarly hit by news that Virginia toddler, Cameron Massie, 2, died in the same way earlier this month just one day after his mother, Shannon Clay, got married.
For any parent the horror these stories trigger is visceral. But for 41-year-old Wages, they hit home in the most devastatingly personal way.
Because, in August 2015, her adorable little boy, Paxton drowned in the family pool. He was just four years old.
Now, as she and her husband, Seth, 42, approach the ten-year anniversary of his death, Wages has spoken exclusively to the Daily Mail about her unimaginable suffering while issuing a stark warning to parents everywhere.
‘Most people don’t realize that drowning is the number one cause of death in America among children aged up to five,’ she said. ‘Now Paxton can no longer live on this earth, I can build his legacy by preventing other families from experiencing our pain.’
Saturday August 15, 2015, was a hot, sunny day in Fort Worth, Texas. Wages and her kids, Presleigh, then seven, and Pierce, then six, had been cooling off in their backyard pool with Paxton and a friend.
The older kids could swim but Paxton, who was enrolled in swim lessons, wasn’t quite there yet and wore a life jacket for buoyancy.
Pictured: Three-year-old Paxton Wages who drowned nearly ten years ago in his family’s brand new backyard pool. ‘Most people don’t realize that drowning is the number one cause of death in America among children aged up to five,’ his mother, Kaitlyn Wages, 41, said.
Wages, a water safety advocate, said, ‘Now Paxton can no longer live on this earth, I can build his legacy by preventing other families from experiencing our pain’
The pool was very much a novelty because it had only been completed the previous week. Wages had asked the contractors to hold off filling it with water until a fence had been installed – work that was scheduled to be done the following week.
But the contractors explained that the concrete walls would likely crumble in the Texan heat without the pressure of the water keeping them in place. The couple felt they had no choice but to follow their advice.
Wages, a former midwife, had been watching the children mostly on her own that August day because Seth, a construction worker, was catching up with some work on a site. After several hours in the sun she and the children headed back inside to relax in the cool of the living room.
Presleigh and Pierce played together. Paxton, exhausted after being in the pool, fell asleep in her arms.
Around 6pm, Wages did what she describes as ‘the mom sneak,’ gently peeling the boy off her body as he continued to nap. She laid him down on the armchair. She spent a few minutes transferring some laundry from the washing machine to the dryer before walking into the kitchen and putting a pizza in the oven for dinner.
‘When I came back into the living room, I saw that Paxton wasn’t asleep in the chair any longer,’ she recalled. She said she didn’t feel any sense of panic because she’d locked the door that opened into the backyard and thought the knob was too high for Paxton to reach.
‘I called his name and, because he had a habit of hiding in nooks and crannies and under the beds with an I-pad, walked nonchalantly through the house looking for him,’ she said.
Heartbreakingly, she blames herself for not looking outside first, telling the Daily Mail that it was her, ‘first mistake.’ When there was no immediate sign of him she enlisted the help of her two older children to help look.
To this day, Wages is haunted by the blood-curdling scream that Pierce let out when he looked in the backyard. ‘He yelled his brother’s name, and I rushed outside,’ she said. There, to her horror, she saw Paxton lying motionless at the bottom of the hot tub at the end of the pool.
Pictured: Cameron Massie, two, accidentally drowned in the pool in the family’s backyard in June, just a day after his mother was married there
Pictured: Influencer Emilie Kiser with her husband, Brady,their newborn baby, Theodore and three-year-old son, Trigg, who accidentally drowned in the pool they’d installed in their backyard
She jumped into the water, pulled him out and laid him on the ground. Presleigh ran into the house to get her cellphone while the frantic mother administered CPR. She dialed 911 as she struggled to find a pulse. After a while, the boy’s stomach started rising so she knew he was getting some oxygen.
The paramedics were able to detect a faint pulse as they lifted Paxton into the ambulance. But, as a police officer drove Wages to the leading children’s hospital in the area, she was overwhelmed by a sense of panic and impending doom.
She recalled: ‘I called Seth and told him that our precious son had drowned, and he should meet me at the medical center.’ Next, she called her mother and other relatives and said the same thing.
‘By the time I got there, a group of people were praying in the waiting room for God to save him,’ she said. ‘I was screaming and wailing and couldn’t pray. I just knew Paxton wasn’t going to make it and, if God didn’t answer my prayer, I would never believe in him again.’
After a wait that seemed to last a lifetime, Wages and her husband were ushered into Paxton’s room. He was connected to a breathing machine and surrounded by tubes and wires. The doctors said that, although he had a pulse, he had extensive brain swelling.
Hysterical, Wages remembered gnashing her teeth in pain. ‘Every time a nurse or a doctor walked in, I begged them to let me take Paxton’s place,’ she said. ‘In that moment, I really thought that, if they let me die, he could live.’
But multiple scans showed no brain activity. There was no hope. ‘We wanted the most merciful choice for our child and made the decision to remove him from life support,’ she said. She held Paxton as he slipped away around 24 hours after the accident.
Pictured: Paxton, whom his mom described as having a ‘loving and kind’ nature
Pictured: Paxton who, like many kids, idolized Superman and love to dress up as him
Pictured: Paxton as a newborn with his older brother, Pierce, and sister, Presleigh, who doted on him
She and Seth agreed that their youngest child’s organs should be donated. A total of seven recipients are alive because of Paxton.
But, Wages admitted: ‘There were pieces of him that I couldn’t part with — like his beautiful eyes.’
In the years since the tragedy, Wages has reached out to the organization that arranged the transplants to check on the health of the recipients. She is particularly concerned about the welfare of the three-year-old boy who received her son’s heart. Out of everything, she explained, ‘Paxton’s heart matters to me the most.’
Receiving the updates is difficult, she said, because her emotions range from pride that something good has come out of the tragedy to a feeling of unbridled envy. The parents of the children to whom Paxton’s organs were donated get to celebrate milestones such as birthdays and graduations that she and Seth will never share with him.
For Wages and her husband, the torment of Paxton’s drowning lasted years. She constantly blamed herself for what happened. Her thoughts were dominated by ‘what if’ and ‘if only.’ She would scream at Seth, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Can you ever forgive me?’ even though he told her without fail there was ‘nothing to forgive.’
Wages said: ‘You have two choices when tragedy happens. You are either going to let it kill your relationship, or it will bring you closer together.’ She added that Seth was ‘her rock.’
She said he sometimes blamed himself because he was out of the house working that day, leaving her to watch three young children. ‘I think the Lord allowed it to be me who was at home,’ she said. ‘Because if it had been him, I do not think that I would have been able to forgive.’
Wages has undergone years of therapy, including treatment for PTSD.
Pictured: Paxton dressed as a lion with his older siblings on Halloween when they dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz
Pictured: Wages with Paxton, Pierce and Presleigh, before the accident that claimed Paxton’s life
It took years, she said, but ‘I was finally able to stop blaming myself. I reached the place where I was able to objectively say it was an accident.
‘They happen to good people and bad people alike, and you can’t shield yourself and others from everything in life.’
While no child could ever replace Paxton — whom Wages said had a loving, kind nature — she and Seth went on to have another son, Shepherd, born by surrogate in 2017 since she could no longer carry another baby herself.
‘He is our miracle,’ Wages said of the boy, who turns eight in July.
As for her advocacy work, Wages is committed to raising awareness about both pool and open water safety. ‘Many people seem scared to take the fun out of water, but to truly have fun, you have to be safe,’ she said.
Her advice includes equipping kids with US Coastguard-approved life jackets and never using inflatables or toys as flotation devices. Install locks and alarms in the ground floor of your home. Don’t let anyone near the pool before building a fence with alarms and child-proof levers on the gates.
‘They might not look pleasant, but they save lives,’ Wages said. And, although they may be costly, an electronic automatic pool cover instead of a soft, floating cover provides a solid barrier to prevent accidental falls into the water.
Pictured: From left, Pierce, Wages, Seth, Shepherd and Presleigh
Meanwhile always appoint a designated adult to act as a lifeguard in timed shifts during gatherings. ‘Never assume that someone else is watching out for the children in the water,’ Wages said, noting that drownings often happen when there is a crowd of adults who abdicate responsibility.
She encourages parents to enroll their children in so-called Infant Survival Resource (ISR) classes, from as young as six months. Babies and toddlers who are not yet walking well can, she explained, learn techniques such as rotating onto their backs to float and stay calm instead of panicking by using breathing exercises.
As they gain more confidence, they can be taught how to alternate between turning on their back to float and swimming a short distance to the side of the pool or the shore.
Wages said that campaigning for better water safety brings at least some comfort as she continues to mourn the loss of her beloved Paxton.
‘We were blessed to have had him in our lives for the four years he spent on earth,’ she said. ‘His memory touches us every day.
‘We will love him for all eternity.’
* For more information about pool and open water safety, visit The National Drowning Prevention Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to reducing incidents of downing.
