Toddler Pulled From Swimming Pool Dies : Drowning: The director of the day-care center frantically tried to follow 911 instructions to save the 1 1/2-year-old girl.

A dramatic 911 tape-recording released Wednesday shows that the director of a home day-care center--although hysterical--desperately tried to follow a dispatcher’s instructions to revive a comatose toddler found floating face down in a swimming pool.

But 27 hours after the rescue attempt, 18-month-old Ariel Nicole Moon showed no sign that she would regain consciousness and was removed from life-support systems at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. She died at 3:25 p.m. Wednesday, coroner’s investigator Steve Eicherly said, and an autopsy is scheduled for today.

Although an investigation is continuing, officials believe the death was accidental.

The toddler was found at 11:44 a.m. on Tuesday in the back-yard swimming pool of a licensed day-care center operated out of a three-bedroom home on Ale Street.

In a 2 1/2-minute tape of the call to emergency authorities, day-care director Jane Ann Siemer, 46, pleaded for help and had to be told repeatedly to calm down and concentrate on administering CPR.

“I have a first-aid card,” Siemer told the dispatcher. “Just tell me how to do it and I’ll do it. Please tell me what to do!”

After several attempts to keep the woman focused on the CPR task, the dispatcher told her: “Listen. Don’t worry about that. I want--you need to do exactly what I’ve told you to do.”

Seconds later, Siemer screamed into the telephone: “Please Lord, let her live! Oh God, let my (sic) baby live! Man, I’m scared out of my mind. . . .!

“If she dies on me, I might just go to jail!” Siemer continued. The dispatcher interrupted her.

“Would you calm down?” the dispatcher said. “Don’t worry about that. We need to save the baby. You need to be doing CPR. . . . Quit worrying about it.”

Although Orange County Fire Department Capt. Dan Young said Siemer told the dispatcher that she had taken about two hours of training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, she rambled throughout the taped conversation while a rescue crew raced to the house.

“She wasn’t making any sense at all,” Young said. “She was very much beside herself.”

State day-care licensing officials announced Wednesday that they had begun an investigation of the incident. A state investigator visited the home during the morning, but his findings were not released.

“We’ve opened an investigation, and possibly by this week there may be more information,” said Diane Hawthorne, a supervisor for the California Department of Social Services.

If a day-care home is found to have violated any regulations, penalties can range from a citation with orders to correct the problem to license revocation, Hawthorne said.

“In between, there are various and sundry steps we can take,” including formal conferences with a day-care licensee or a temporary license suspension, she said.

Siemer was unavailable for comment.

Although state regulations permit family day-care homes to have a pool if it is properly enclosed, “there’s always been concern about pools and spas and Jacuzzis,” Hawthorne said. “We are always concerned about the health and safety of the kids.”

Ariel’s parents spent the day at the hospital and declined to discuss the investigation. “I don’t know what to think,” said Tony Moon, Ariel’s father.

Earlier Wednesday, two men at the day-care center were working in the enclosed patio that leads to the ungated swimming pool. There were no signs of other children.

A woman who answered the door said the men “were just straightening up.” She declined to identify herself or elaborate.

Just before the accident, Ariel was sleeping on the couch in the living room, Siemer told police and paramedics. Siemer left the room for a few minutes. But when she returned, she found the child missing. Moments later, she spotted the girl in the swimming pool, floating face down. She grabbed the girl, put her on the couch, and dialed 911.

“She fell into my pool,” Siemer screamed to the 911 dispatcher. “How she got out I don’t know, but she got out.”

Sheriff’s Department spokesman Lt. Richard J. Olson said that investigators have not completed their own inquiry into the death but added that it appears that it was accidental.

“The follow-up investigation is not all completely done yet,” Olson said. “I don’t know if there’s been any absolute determination how she got out there” to the pool.

According to the 1988 licensing report, Siemer’s patio between the house and the pool was enclosed with a latticework barricade with “self-latching gates.”

On Wednesday morning, a 2-foot-wide section of latticework about three feet from the ground was missing some slats. In the front of the house, a placard bearing the address dangled from the eaves, and several dead birds lay in dirt and brown grass not far from three rusting cars.

Well before Tuesday’s accident, Orange County’s annual warm-weather “drowning season” had already begun, health officials said.

Before this week, the statistics included one child drowned in a back-yard pool, another drowned in a back-yard spa and 13 more near-drowning victims, children pulled from a pool or spa and resuscitated. Typically, some of the victims recover unharmed but some, especially if they have been underwater six minutes or more, suffer severe brain damage.

Experts on drowning say that Orange County--and all of Southern California--has a regular drowning season, starting in March and continuing through August. When the weather is warm, doors are often left open and children are attracted to a shimmering pool.

Pulmonary specialist Dr. Ralph Rucker, who has tracked drownings for years, said that during the summer, “we get like five and six (drownings) a month.” Intensive care wards at Children’s Hospital typically treat 35 to 40 drowning or near-drowning victims a year, Rucker said.

Rucker, like several other doctors who regularly try to resuscitate drowning victims, says stiff ordinances requiring fencing on all sides of back-yard pools could reduce the number of drowning cases by half.

In Orange County, as in most communities across the nation, local building codes have required a three-sided fence around a pool--to keep out trespassers--but the codes have not required a barrier to block a toddler’s access from his home to the pool.

However, when some communities--among them, Tucson and Phoenix, Ariz.--began requiring a four-sided fence, drownings reportedly have dropped sharply.

Rucker also said he was shocked to learn that a licensed day-care center was allowed to have a pool.

Also concerned about the state licensing regulation that allows a day-care home to have a pool was state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach). Tuesday’s incident “raises the question of whether even an enclosed pool can be considered safe when you have youngsters in that setting,” Bergeson said.

Bergeson added she would direct her staff to investigate more stringent standards for home day care.

Also concerned about a day-care center pool was the county’s public health officer, L. Rex Ehling.

“My intuitive sense is it wouldn’t be advisable,” Ehling said, adding that as yet he did not have enough evidence to recommend a change in regulations.

Times staff writer Henry Chu contributed to this report.