Sobbing grandad reveals 'the reason' he dropped toddler from cruise ship window

The grandfather charged with negligent homicide after his granddaughter plunged to her death from an 11th floor cruise ship window insists he didn’t realise it was open because he’s colourblind.

Salvatore Anello told CBS This Morning that 18-month-old Chloe Wiegand fell to her death in July after he lifted her to a window on the Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas in Puerto Rico so she could bang on the glass as she did at hockey games.

The 51-year-old from Indiana, US, said he was trying to stand her on the window’s railing when she plunged from the open window to the dock far below.

He said that “it happened in seconds”.

“I saw her fall. I saw her fall the whole way down. I saw her fall, and I was just in disbelief. I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ and then I just remember screaming that I thought there was glass there,” Anello said in an interview that aired on Tuesday (local time).

Sobbing as he recalled the events leading up to the child’s deadly fall, he said he’s colour blind and that may be why he didn’t realise the tinted window was open.

“I just never saw it. I’ve been told that that’s a reason it might have happened,” he said, referring to his eyesight condition.

Anello was charged with negligent homicide last month over Chloe’s death.

Puerto Rico’s attorney general and other officials said in a news release announcing the charge that Anello had “negligently exposed the child to the abyss through a window on the 11th floor of the cruise ship”, The Indianapolis Star reported.

An attorney for the Wiegand family, Michael Winkleman, has called Chloe’s death “a tragic accident” and said that the family, who is from the northern Indiana community of Granger, plans to file a lawsuit against Royal Caribbean.

Winkleman has said that Chloe had wanted to bang on the glass “like she always did at her older brother’s hockey games” the family attended.

But he said the window had inexplicably been left open in a children’s play area.

CCTV footage of Chloe’s death used in court

Anello’s attorney, José G. Pérez Ortiz, told The Star that surveillance video of the incident is consistent with the grandfather’s assertion that he believed the window was closed.

“My client thought that the window was closed,” Ortiz said. “Nothing in the video is inconsistent.”

Prosecutors delivered that video and other evidence to the defence last week, Ortiz said.

Anello is scheduled to appear on December 17 in court in Puerto Rico.

He said that he initially blamed himself for his granddaughter’s death, but now believes the cruise line should have had a sign posted warning that windows in the area where she fell could be open.

If there was such a sign, he said, “this wouldn’t have happened”.

- with AP

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