This story was originally published in the Southlake Independent on June 6, 2022. I’ve reposted the original version here since the Southlake Independent’s website is no longer online.
Lori Cerami wants no other family to lose their child to drowning.
Her 13-year-old daughter Elise, a student athlete with the North Texas Natadores, drowned during swim practice June 20, 2016. Cerami established Swim4Elise, a nonprofit foundation, to honor her.
“It’s hard to wrap your head around, somebody who knows how to swim could still drown, but it happens,” she said. “Your kid can swim a mile in 20 minutes — you think they’re safe.”
The swimming pool at Carroll ISD had lifeguards at more than half of the team’s practices, but there was no lifeguard the day Elise drowned, Cerami said.
“We remind people that even after someone knows how to swim, they still need someone watching the water, regardless if it’s a public pool or your own private backyard pool,” she said.
Although swimming lessons and training can reduce the risk of drowning, children who know how to swim still need “close and constant supervision,” according to drowning prevention data listed on the CDC’s website.
“We’re just not 100 percent safe when it comes to water because we’re not fish,” she said.
The exact cause of Elise’s drowning remains unknown, despite a medical autopsy, Cerami said.
“We can only speculate,” she said. “The medical examiner said she was healthy. There’s nothing wrong with her. She didn’t have a stroke, she didn’t have a hole in her heart, she didn’t have a seizure. We have no idea.”
Cerami said she has since learned that even a trained swimmer can be affected by body temperature changes, muscle cramps, low blood pressure or not enough electrolytes.
“And there was an empty lifeguard chair about eight feet from where they found her,” Cerami said.
Now Carroll ISD has lifeguards at every swim practice, she said.
The coach responsible for Elise’s swim lane was charged with criminal endangerment of a child and sentenced to probation. But that’s not what her mother said she tries to focus on.
“When I talk about drowning prevention and water safety, I really want my daughter’s story to be relayed in a positive way, so that people can learn from it, and that her legacy has a positive impact,” Cerami said.
Elise’s teammates estimated that she had been in the water for about six minutes when they found her, she said. Those girls pulled her off the bottom of the 7-foot pool across swim lane ropes where another coach started performing CPR.
Paramedics who arrived at the scene in two ambulances then noticed the coach began to have symptoms of a heart attack.
“Crazy story,” Cerami said. “He ended up with a ‘widow-maker’ heart attack. I truly think my daughter saved his life.”
After an exhausting criminal trial and her father’s funeral two years after Elise’s death, she said the family decided not to pursue a civil lawsuit and instead turned to forming the non-profit foundation Swim4Elise to educate other families about the importance of water safety.
She said she made a list of 20 things she wanted to accomplish to honor Elise.
“I’m pretty tenacious,” she said. “Slowly but surely, I have checked off one at a time.”
Her original goals were funding college scholarships and lifeguard certification training programs when Swim4Elise first started. A soccer mom from the Grapevine-Southlake Soccer Association where her husband David was a volunteer coach started a YouCaring fundraiser after Elise’s death.
“After a few weeks, there was a sizeable amount of money in it,” Cerami said.
She asked her husband what Elise would want them to do with the donations. Health insurance covered her hospital bills, and life insurance covered her funeral.
“People in the community were very generous and supportive, and that’s how the non-profit started,” Cerami said. “We decided to use those funds and put it into the nonprofit.”
Cerami earned her lifeguard certification after her daughter’s death, which prompted her to want to give this training first to Elise’s teammates and then others in the community.
“Those girls were scared to get back in the water,” Cerami said. “We paid for them to get lifeguard certified because I know my daughter wanted them to get back in the water. She would want them to continue to swim, but she would want them to know what to do if anything ever happened again.
Each lifeguard certification training costs about $250, she said.
“We encourage swimmers to get lifeguard certified even if they never become a lifeguard,” Cerami said. “We want them to just have the skills to know what to do and have the confidence to respond.”
One of their major fundraisers is Run4Elise, a 5K/1 mile fun run event in May, which doubles as a recognition ceremony for the foundation’s college scholarships and water safety awareness.
“We bring safety into the entire race — we talk about safety from the stage,” she said.
Similar to Touch-A-Truck events where children and their families learn about first responders and the vehicles they drive for their jobs, Run4Elise hosts CareFlight helicopters along with fire trucks, police and ambulances to educate the community.
Often fun runs or races charge for photos, but Run4Elise has a reason for not charging for runner photos.
“We want you to download our pictures and share something you’ve learned about water safety, something you learned about our daughter’s story,” Cerami said. “And you will help us further the message. I can only get the message to maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people. Imagine if each one of those people got it to 100 people?
“What would that reminder do, while Texas is heating up and people are getting in the water?”
The annual Run4Elise fun run event funds classroom water safety education for over 5,000 children in the North Texas area, Cerami said.
“We don’t have to charge one dime,” she said. “We offer the service completely free to the local daycares.”
Each child goes home with a water safety packet, sponsored by a partnership between Swim4Elise and Cook Children’s Medical Center.
“The goal is that kids are excited enough about it to go home and teach their family about water safety,” Cerami said. “I get stories back from parents [saying], ‘My 5-year-old learned about your program today and he came home and taught the 8-year-old.’ It’s a very grassroots organization.”
Cerami believes that everyone needs to change their behavior around water and become more attentive, especially with their children.
“We don’t let our kids play with fire, but yet we let them play with water and we’re not doing that with enough caution,” she said. “We’re not teaching them how to be respectful of that water.”
She said a mother told her a story about their 3-year-old telling her to put down her cellphone and watch them because of their water safety classroom programs.
“That’s the kind of advocacy we’re teaching kids — to make sure mom and dad are watching you,” she said.
Cerami said she started the water safety education classes on the one-year anniversary of Elise’s death after another mother whose daughter was also a swimmer asked her what she was going to do.
“I chose daycares because I learned through Cook Children’s that drowning is the number one accidental cause of death of kids ages one through four,” she said. “It’s number three for kids ages five through 18.
“If there was a disease that caused children to die at the rate drowning happens, parents would be irate, wanting to find a treatment.”
In 2021, 77 children died from drowning in Texas, according to data from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
Each year when future college students receive Swim4Elise scholarships, they are also contributing to research to improve the American Red Cross’ lifeguard training, Cerami said.
She said she wanted to learn something through the scholarships.
“I felt like there was so much I needed to learn, because I just still couldn’t understand how this could happen,” she said.
All applicants have to fill out a water safety survey and write essays about water safety. Cerami collects the data, redacting applicant names, and sends the information to the American Red Cross, who writes training and safety manuals for swimming across the United States.
“The voices of the kids who swim get to impact their own sport,” she said. “They hear what these kids are saying about the water and they use that information to make the training manuals better.”
Another item on Cerami’s list was Elise’s posthumous high school diploma, which she said the school district initially denied.
“As an eighth grader, my daughter was 100 points away from a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT,” she said.
At 13, Elise already had plans to attend Texas A&M’s engineering program and then SMU Dedman School of Law to become a patent attorney.
“She said she wanted to see all the cool things that people would come up with to save the world,” Cerami said. “I don’t know how an 8th grade girl thinks that way. Pretty wise old soul. It was important to us. She had this big dream and this big vision of her future.”
Cermai said her request was granted after she contacted her state representative to change Jennifer’s Law to allow families of students besides seniors who died before graduation to receive their child’s diploma.
“The year that she graduated, at our own campus, there were five families that were able to get their child’s posthumous diploma,” she said. “Here I was doing something that really made an impact.”
Families in other states contacted her asking how they could do the same thing for their child, Cerami said.
“If it created the momentum for those people, that’s a great impact to have,” she said.
One of Cerami’s biggest goals right now is to convince cities across Texas to implement emergency action plans in their aquatics programs.
“We do fire drills in schools with kids,” she said. “There’s not a lot of burning buildings at schools, but the kids that swim, like my daughter, they’re in the water sometimes two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. That’s a lot of time in the water.”
Most children are not trained for emergencies in the water, Cerami said.
“I would love to see them implement safety training similar to a fire drill, but with kids that swim,” she said.
Every five years when Texas state officials decide on pool codes, Cerami advocates for more lifeguards at public pools.
“They now require two lifeguards instead of just one, but the classification of the pools is a little ambiguous,” she said. “I think there probably needs to be some improvement on those classifications.”
Cerami said she wants her daughter’s story to mean something and raise awareness of the dangers young swimmers face.
“Not enough was being done,” she said. “I just felt compelled to do something. I felt like her story could reach you in a way that moved you. When I tell you about my daughter, I tell you what a wonderful swimmer she was, how much she loved the water, and then I tell you that she e drowned at swim practice. These kids that I talk to about her, they feel like they could have known her, like they could have been with her.
“I want to reach children in a way that the story is meaningful so that the rule sticks with them.”
Younger children often slip away from parents’ supervision to backyard pools, where the majority of child drownings occur, Cerami said.
“That’s why I target daycares,” she said.
Bright-colored swimsuits do not always save children from drowning, Cerami said.
“Her swimsuit — the one they cut off of her — was hot pink,” she said. “I post a picture and share it because I want people to realize it’s important to be visible, but scanning the water is even more important than the color of your swimsuit.”
One thing still on Cerami’s list is that the school would rename the pool Elise drowned in for her.
“I’ve been asking for years for them to honor her by naming the pool after her, so that her story can continue to be shared by people who use that pool, years later, about the importance of watching the water,” she said.
Cerami has two other children, a 14-year-old son and a baby girl born three weeks ago.
“There are some days that I can talk about it really well and then there’s just some moments when I get kind of choked up about it still,” she said. “Because I miss her a lot.”
For more information or to make a donation, visit www.swim4elise.com.
Eleanor Skelton 