Family of child burned in over-chlorinated resort pool gets $26 million settlement

A South Carolina resort will pay $26 million to the family of a child who suffered serious chemical burns from an overchlorinated pool, an attorney for the family said.

According to a federal lawsuit, the North Carolina family sued Myrtle Beach’s Caribbean Resort, after their then 3-year-old child suffered severe burns from the pool when they visited in May 2020.

The lawsuit on behalf of Heather Douglas, the little boy's mother said she noticed her son Ashtyn Douglas' "groin and buttocks" were red after they finished swimming in the resort's pools and lazy rivers on May 25, 2020.

Douglas applied some lotion on Ashtyn and headed home. The next day, she noticed that his skin began to blister and took him to his pediatrician who prescribed him Bactroban. However, the next day, the blisters got worse, and Douglas took her child back to the pediatrician.

Ashtyn was then sent to a local hospital, before being transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Burn Center.

There, the blisters were diagnosed "as chemical burns related to exposure to an overchlorinated pool at the Caribbean Resort and Villas," the lawsuit said.

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Ashtyn will live with scars for the rest of his life

The now 7-year-old spent a week in the burn unit receiving treatment.

"What Ashtyn went through initially was this God-awful pain. His skin was being eaten away by chemicals. That's the way chlorine burns work – it doesn't typically happen all at once. It eats the skin away," Kenneth Berger, an attorney for the family told USA TODAY.

Berger said it wasn't just the treatments in the hospital that were tough on Ashtyn, but the wound care afterward.

Debridement is the surgical removal of dead tissue from a wound. During his treatment, Ashtyn experienced loss of appetite, immobility, discomfort, fever, pain, and nausea, the lawsuit said.

At home, Ashtyn had to get wound care multiple times a day.

"One of the things his family members talked about was that a couple of the men in the family, tough guys, and one who was former military, actually couldn't participate in Ashtyn's wound care when they got home because it hurt their feelings too much. They talked about it being like torture, where you'd have four family members holding this child down while his mother worked to clean his wound," Berger said.

Resort employee admitted falsifying chlorine levels, attorney says

According to the lawsuit, Douglas called the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and reported that Ashtyn was burned from swimming in the resort's pools. The agency then inspected the pools and found that they had "dangerously" high chlorine levels that did not comply with state-mandated standards for public pools.

Additionally, Berger said an employee deposed during the case admitted to falsifying chlorine levels to DHEC for three and a half years. The attorney said resort employees and leadership appeared to not care that the levels were falsified and illegal.

According to the attorney, resort workers deposed claimed they received no other complaints but a check of the resort's Google reviews showed several other people complaining of skin issues from chlorine.

"When confronted with that evidence, their answer was 'We thought you meant legal complaints, not actual complaints to the resort,' -- Which we found incredibly disingenuous," Berger said.

"At that point, they disclosed a few complaints concerning people with burns or skin issues but claimed that those incidents were only after Ashtyn got burned, which we found hard to believe," he added.

The resort did not respond to USA TODAY's request for comment.

Berger said the lawsuit was never about money.

"His mother never once asked about money throughout the entire case. From the first time I met her, until the last time I spoke with her, it was all about accountability and making sure this never happened to anybody else. Throughout the course of the entire case, we never once heard the word sorry, or an apology from this resort" he said.

For Ashtyn, the settlement isn't the end of the incident. Berger said this is something the young child will have to live with for the rest of his life.

"Ashtyn's got many, many, many years ahead of him, God willing. He's never gonna forget this. He's never going to forget the scars that run along the right side of his groin and his waistband. The people who caused it should never forget either," Berger said.