The grandfather of the toddler who took a fatal fall from a cruise ship docked in Puerto Rico in July was charged Monday with negligent homicide in her death.
Prosecutors in San Juan say Salvatore Anello raised his 18-month-old granddaughter, Chloe Wiegand, up to an open window of Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas on July 17.
The girl plunged from the ship’s 11th floor to the concrete on the Pan American dock II in San Juan below.
A lawyer for the Indiana family has said Chloe asked her grandfather to lift her up so she could bang on the window of a children’s play area — which had been slid open, unbeknownst to him.
“Chloe wanted to bang on the glass like she always did at her older brothers’ hockey games,” attorney Michael Winkleman said in a July statement.
“Her grandfather thought there was glass just like everywhere else, but there was not, and she was gone in an instant.”
Parents Alan and Kimberly Wiegand have said they don’t blame Anello for the tragedy, instead blasting the cruise line as negligent for inexplicably leaving the window open.
“We obviously blame them,” Kimberly, a former St. Joseph County deputy prosecutor, told NBC’s “Today” show earlier this year.
“We have a lot of questions. Why is there an open window in the kids’ area 11 stories up?” she asked.
The cruise line told the family the window was open for ventilation, she added.
Kimberly said Anello was “extremely hysterical” after the incident and that “at no point has [he] ever put our kids in danger.”
“You can barely look at him without him crying,” she said. “[Chloe] was his best friend.”
Anello is being held on $80,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court Nov. 20.