A FATHER told how he heard his daughter screaming when the body of her infant son who had just fallen in the garden pond was carried into the house. The death of 17-month-old Daniel Peralta, who fell in his grandparents’ garden pond at Hawarden, was ‘an unspeakable tragedy’, said north east Wales coroner John Hughes. No one knew how Daniel had got into the pond, said the coroner. A doctor who was a family friend gave emergency CPR to Daniel until paramedics arrived, but the youngster died over a week later, on August 10, at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool of the brain damage he suffered due to drowning. A post-mortem examination was not carried out because doctors knew the cause of death. Parents Jorge and Laura Peralta, from Whitney, Oxford, were returning from a Lake District holiday with Daniel and four-year-old Ella and friends, and had decided to break their journey by staying with Laura’s parents, John and Elaine Hocking, at Pitmans Close in Hawarden, at the end of July. Along with friends Emma and Kevin Worrall and their children they all stayed an extra day for a family re-union with Laura’s brothers. Mrs Worrall, also from Oxford, said she and her husband, Daniel and her son Harry were in the garden on August 1 and about 6.45pm it was time for Harry to go to bed. She went upstairs to bathe the children and then she and her husband were reading them bedtime stories when Laura popped in and asked where Daniel was. She rushed downstairs to check the garden. “I heard her in hysterics,” said Mrs Worrall in a statement read out at Mold on Friday. Mr Hocking, a costs lawyer, said: “My daughter Laura was screaming that Daniel was in the pond. I ran into the kitchen and Jorge came in from the garden carrying Daniel in his arms. “One of our guests was a doctor and she performed CPR on him while someone called the ambulance. She continued until the ambulance arrived and they took over.” Mr Hughes said: “This must have been quite an indescribable state of affairs, it’s so horrific, the worst nightmare of any parent.” Doctors at Alder Hey warned that Daniel would have suffered overwhelming brain damage. Mr Hughes said Daniel was clearly loved. “He somehow slipped off and went into the pond,” he said. “That is an unspeakable tragedy and people will regret that state of affairs for as long as they live. “This was a tragic accident. I don’t even know whether he slipped or fell or was attracted to the pond, but it doesn’t make any difference.” He recorded a verdict of accidental death. | 
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