No parent expects to outlive their children, but when Chloe Wiegand suddenly died at the age of 18-months, her parents were utterly devastated. Chloe did not succumb to a childhood disease or any sickness that can randomly affect even the most healthy-looking children. She died in a much more violent manner. Chloe fell to her death, right in front of her parents, off the side of a docked cruise ship in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The baby girl died as she was playing on the cruise ship and fell out an open window. Although her parents were initially horrified by the terrible accident, they have started to see that things should not have happened the way they had. And now they’re pointing the finger of blame away from themselves and their family members and onto something else that caused their “unfathomable” pain.
Chloe fell to her death while she was with her family. She was playing on the eleventh floor of the Freedom of the Seas cruise ship part of the Royal Caribbean line.
In a gut-wrenching interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, the parents revealed their pain and suffering. Chloe had been with her grandfather, Sam Anello, at the time she fell to her death from the ship. Her parents deny the initial reports that blame Sam, claiming he “dangled” the toddler from the cruise ship window just as Michael Jackson did to his kid from the balcony decades ago.
Instead, the girl’s parents claim that Grandpa Sam lifted Chloe and placed her on a railing near a wall of glass. The girl was excited to see the beautiful view of the harbor. However, no one could tell, but one of the glass panes was not solid. It had been opened and was a window that looked out upon a drop more than 150 feet below.
While speaking to Guthrie, Chloe’s mother, Kimberly Wiegan, recalled the moment she learned that her daughter was dead.
“I didn’t know that she went out a window,” she told Guthrie. “And I just kept sayingTake me to my baby. Where’s my baby?’ I didn’t even notice a window. I ran over there, and I looked over, and it wasn’t water down there, it was concrete. To lose our baby this way is just unfathomable.”
Witnesses claim that Kimberly screamed so loudly, everyone across the cruise ship deck could hear her.
“This one mother just came and held me and embraced me and I’ll never forget it,” Wiegand shared. “She just saidGod, watch over this family.’ I just want to thank her. I don’t know where she is or who she is.”
Meanwhile, Sam Anello became “extremely hysterical.”
“The thing that he has repeatedly told us isI believed that there was glass,’” Kimberly said. “He will cry over and over and over.”
Kimberly also made it clear that Sam was a great, responsible grandfather.
“At no point ever, ever has Sam ever put our kids in danger,” she said. “[He’s] very, very distraught. You can barely look at him without him crying. She was his best friend.”
Now Kimberly and Chloe’s dad, Alan, are pointing the blame at Royal Caribbean.
The mother said, “We obviously blame them for not having a safer situation on the 11th floor of that cruise ship.”
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