A Las Vegas mother is mourning the loss of her son in what appears to be a pool drowning last month that she believes could have turned out differently if police had taken her emergency calls seriously.
TayShaun Todd was excited to be attending the second adult party of his life in June when the unthinkable happened. He never returned home, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
His mother called police on June 17 to report him missing when she learned the party was shut down by police, but Todd had not returned home.
Christina Todd-Dunn said it took several calls “begging” and “pleading” before officers went to the home to check. They did not find her son that day.
However, the next day, a man in the home called 911 after discovering a body in the pool, where the coroner said he had been for at least 12 hours.
“The part that is so upsetting to me is, if the police would have got there and came when I asked them to, they could have gotten him out. He could still be alive right now,” Todd-Dunn told the Review-Journal.
“Police officers failed me,” she added.
Todd-Dunn went to the house herself after Todd’s friend left the party with her son’s keys, wallet and cellphone and alerted her family. She says she called the police on the way. The man who answered the door said everyone had left the party, and he asked her to leave, too.
She said when police finally did arrive at the home hours later, they didn’t do a thorough search; instead, they asked her demeaning questions about her son, such as whether he was drinking or doing drugs.
Todd-Dunn says she tried to convince officers that her son wasn’t drinking or on drugs and that it wasn’t normal for him to be missing like he was.
“Do you really think I’d be out here in my pajamas looking for him if I thought that was the norm?” Todd-Dunn told the Review-Journal. “I could have rolled back over and went to sleep, like, ‘Oh, he’ll turn up.’ But I knew something had to be wrong, because that’s not him.”
TayShaun Todd was a student at the College of Southern Nevada, where he studied sports management and was preparing to start a teaching assistant job at a school in Henderson County, Nevada, in August.
Then, at 12:30 p.m. the following day, on June 18, police took an emergency call from a man who said police had searched his home the previous night, but it wasn’t until the next morning that he saw the body at the bottom of the pool.
“I feel like the police officers failed me. They failed my son. Y’all should have done a full search if it was a pool party and I’m saying he didn’t come up out of here. Y’all should have turned the house upside down to find him,” she said.
Todd-Dunn says the loss of her son has been hard on her and everyone who knew him. She says she can hardly eat or sleep.
“‘Everybody is taking it extremely hard,” she told the newspaper.
In the latest development in the case, a suspect has been charged with two misdemeanor crimes for hosting the illegal party where Todd died, according to the Review-Journal.
