A 9-year-old boy died after he was pulled out of Philadelphia’s Tacony Creek on Sunday night, police said.
The young boy, who has not been identified further, was found unresponsive in the creek around 6:15 p.m. in Philadelphia’s Crescentville neighborhood, local ABC affiliate WPVI reported.
Police officers pulled the boy from the water and took him to St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was pronounced dead around 7:30 p.m.
The boy has not been publicly identified, and police did not release any further details on the case. It remains unclear how the boy ended up in the water and who dialed 911 to alert authorities.
Cops said they are still investigating the incident.
The 9-year-old boy was not the first youngster to die in Tacony Creek, a small waterway in north and east Philadelphia that eventually empties into the Delaware River as Frankford Creek.
In 2014, 15-year-old Ruben Polanco was swimming in the creek with a friend when he drowned in water about 8 feet deep, authorities said at the time.
“There’s hardly a year I can remember that hasn’t had a drowning in one of Philadelphia’s creeks or streams,” Philadelphia firefighter Andrew Brown told local PBS affiliate WHYY in 2014.
Tacony Creek Park, a small green area which the creek flows through, has also been the site of violence in recent years. In 2022, a man was found shot to death in a car just outside the park.
Each year in the U.S., around 3,700 people die by drowning, and around 900 of those people are children, according to the Children’s Safety Network.
