The Manatee County Sheriff's Office dive team has recovered the body of a 5-year-old autistic girl who drowned in a pond Monday, authorities said.
Several witnesses reported seeing the girl in a retention pond off the 4400 block of Ninth Avenue East, in the Braden River Lakes subdivision, about 1:30 p.m.
About a dozen divers and other firefighters searched the pond, which is about 12 to 20 feet deep in its deepest parts.
The child did not know how to swim.
Police say she was at home with her father and grandmother when somehow she managed to wander out a sliding glass door.
The house backs up to a retention pond.
Police say one neighbor called 911 while a lawn care worker and another neighbor, Les Shedek, rushed to try to save her.
"I swam across to where I had seen her and then I swept underneath the bushes and the trees and made my way deeper and deeper,” Shedek said. “It was just very dark under there. I grabbed, I thought I might have had her but it was a big branch. I just went in until I couldn't breathe anymore."
The little girl's name has not been released.
Police say there have been three drownings in Manatee County in the last 30 days.
All of them happened in retention ponds but the other two victims were adults.
Authorities say the little girl had been living with her mother in Clearwater.
Her dad had just one to pick her up for the summer and they had only been home for about an hour when this happened.