A 5-year-old boy and his 7-year-old sister drowned in a swimming pool behind their Long Island home Sunday, officials said.
Suffolk County Police say the young siblings' mother reported them missing from their Central Islip home on Naples Avenue at about 3:30 p.m.
While searching the neighborhood, an officer spotted a shoe floating in a next-door neighbor's pool, which was uncovered, according to Detective Sgt. Edward Fandrey.
Officers jumped into the 4-foot-deep pool and found Ralph Knowles and Sharon Knowles, unconscious and fully clothed, at the bottom. The children were pronounced dead at a hospital.
"There's no words on how I am feeling," Tia Knowles, the grieving mother of the two young siblings, said Monday.
Knowles said she watches her children closely, but Sharon and Ralph somehow managed to escape her watch in "a split second."
"In the time I wasn't watching them, they got into my neighbor's yard and got into the pool," she said.
The pool is surrounded by a deck. Both are sunken into the ground and surrounded by a low, wooden fence that separates the Knowles' backyard from their neighbor's. Tia Knowles said she didn't even know there was a pool in that backyard.
Fandrey said the pool's owner had been cited by the town for improper fencing.
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"The exposed side of the stockade fence was facing out, instead of the smooth side," he said, adding that the slats made it easier to climb over the fence.
Telephone calls to numbers listed for the addresses of the victims and the pool's owner went unanswered Sunday night.
The home where the children lived is owned by a nonprofit that provides housing to homeless families, Newsday reported.
Knowles, a single mother four, just lost her job and doesn't have the money needed to bury her kids.
"My children are gone, and I miss them very much," she said.
-- Greg Cergol contributed to this report.
