Official suggests Marie Joseph was dead in Fall River pool for 2 days

It was a casual outing — four kids, a few adults, a hot day and an open pool right around the corner.

Marie Joseph, 36, joined her neighbors from Reuben Street. They piled into a Toyota Corolla and Veronica Reis drove them to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Pool in Lafayette Park on Sunday just before noon.

“I drove them down and had some errands to do,” Reis said Thursday. “I went back with lunch for everybody.

“When I got there, Marie wasn’t there. She wasn’t with the group.

“I asked. They noticed she was gone. But they had seen her talking with a group of her friends earlier. They thought she left with them,” she said.

Then, on Wednesday morning, Detectives Thomas Chace and Kelly Furtado began knocking on doors in the tenements on Reuben Street, asking everyone if they had seen their neighbor recently.

“They had questions about finding her stuff at the pool,” Reis said. “They asked when we saw her and about her tattoos.

“They told us it appears she drowned in the pool. They said there was no foul play.”

In a separate interview with The Associated Press, Reis said Joseph and a 9-year-old boy in the group went into the pool from a slide. After they splashed into the water, the boy noticed that Joseph hadn’t come back up, Reis said.

“He got up to the water and went to go tell the lifeguard,” said Reis, who talked to the 9-year-old afterward. “The lifeguard said he was going to do a pool check. ... They never did that. They never did anything.”

Joseph was found floating in the pool Tuesday at 10 p.m. by a group of teenagers who jumped the locked fence to get into the pool area after it was closed.

State and city officials have been scrambling ever since to explain — or, more accurately, to not explain — how a person’s body could have been in the pool undetected for 58 hours. The pool was open on Monday and Tuesday.

“The facts appear to indicate that a woman was in the water for a number of days and not noticed by staff, patrons or other inspections that may have taken place,” state Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Richard Sullivan told the AP.

Still, Sullivan did not indicate that pool employees had neglected their duties. Before a pool is locked up for the night, “we undergo a procedure with each and every one of our pools,” Sullivan said. “We believe all of those were in place here.”

He referred additional questions to the police.

The police released no new information about the matter on Thursday.

“As of right now, so much is not determined,” District Attorney Sam Sutter said at a press conference Wednesday when asked if police believed the body was in the water from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday night.

“We do have a tragic death,” Sutter said. “It does appear it happened Sunday afternoon. Other than that, we have few answers.”

Officials held two separate press conferences in front of the pool Thursday.

Mayor Will Flanagan arrived at 10:30 a.m. to report the results of city inspections of the pool on Monday and Tuesday.

“The filters were checked and found to be operational,” Flanagan said. “The pH level was checked and found to be normal. The only abnormality that was noted was one word, the water was ‘cloudy.’”

Flanagan said that report has been supplied to investigators. The two inspectors who performed the tests at the pool have been placed on administrative leave until their work is reviewed to determine if they conducted the inspections appropriately, Flanagan said.

Former Fall River Mayor Edward M. Lambert Jr. is now the commissioner for DCR. He said every person he spoke with, from the governor to his neighbors in Fall River, is upset about the incident.

“I grew up in this neighborhood,” Lambert said during the press conference in Lafayette Park. He said he knows how important the park and the pool is to the neighborhood — a part of town filled with old tenements and low-income families.

“We are very serious about determining the how and the why of this, and determining what actions should have been taken to have prevented this.”

The state’s 24 deep-water pools have been closed until those questions can be answered, Lambert said. Most will reopen before the Fourth of July holiday weekend. The pool in Fall River has no date to reopen, Lambert said. The 12 staff members at the pool have all be placed on administrative leave while the investigation is under way.

One swimmer who visited the pool Monday said she was unnerved by the possibility that they were in the water with a body.

“It was white. We went swimming in that water. There were little kids drinking that water,” Tasha Stokes, 28, told the AP. “I’m shocked. I was swimming in water with a dead person. I think I have a lawsuit on my hands.”

All of those involved on duty at the pool on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday have been interviewed by the Fall River Police, state officials said. Investigators have also spoken to the 9-year-old boy and the lifeguards on duty Sunday, said Gregg Miliote, a spokesman for Bristol County District Country Sam Sutter.

They will be interviewed by DCR staff sometime after that, said Sullivan.

“We look forward to doing our own investigation on where breakdowns occurred,” he said.

Information from The Associated Press was included in this report.

Email Kevin P. O’Connor at koconnor@heraldnews.com.