Little Chloe Wiegand, who was 18 months old, died July 7 when she fell 150 feet from the Royal Caribbean ship Freedom of the Seas.
The family of an Indiana toddler who died earlier this month after falling 11 stories from a docked cruise ship are desperate to stop what happened to their daughter from happening to another family.
Little Chloe Wiegand, who was 18 months old, died July 7 when she fell 150 feet from the Royal Caribbean ship Freedom of the Seas.
"I never want another mother to have to experience this or to see what I had to see or to scream how I had to scream," mother Kimberly Wiegand told the "Today" show in her first interview since the incident.
According to Michael Winkleman, the family's lawyer, Chloe's grandpa, Salvatore "Sam" Anello, had propped Chloe up on a railing to allow her to bang against a glass window, something she did often, in the ship's children's play area known as the H2O Zone.
"Chloe comes over there and wants to look out the windows and [Anello] lifts her up to a railing at the mid-section of these windows and he doesn't know that this one window is open," Winkleman, of the Miami-based law firm Lipcon, Margulies, Alsina & Winkleman, told Inside Edition earlier this month.
He added: "He lets go of her for a second and she's gone."
Initial reports had claimed the grandfather dangled the child out the window, but Winkleman disputed that, instead placing the blame squarely on the cruise line for having an open window in a children's play area.
Chloe's parents, Kimberly and Alan Wiegand, said that they do not blame Anello in the interview with the "Today" show.
“He was extremely hysterical," Kimberly said of Anello. "The thing that he has repeatedly told us is, 'I believed that there was glass.' He will cry over and over and over."
She continued: "We obviously blame them for not having a safer situation on the 11th floor of that cruise ship. There are a million things that could’ve been done to make that safer."
Kimberly added that the family plans to hold the cruise line accountable in court. "I think that they have to be," she said. "This cannot happen to another family."
Asked how they are coping, Kimberly said it's hard to move on.
"It’s the first 30 seconds of the day, I don’t remember what happened and then after that 30 seconds of peace, it comes back and I re-live what happened," she said.
Added Alan of Chloe: “She’s part of our soul that’s not there anymore.”
In a statement, Royal Caribbean told Inside Edition: "We are deeply saddened by this incident, and our hearts go out to the family. We have assisted the authorities in San Juan with their inquiries, and they are the appropriate people to address further questions."
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