3-Year-Old Drowns in Pool Accident : Tragedy: Fullerton boy apparently fell in after entering a neighbor’s back yard. It is the fifth drowning involving O.C. children this year.

A 3-year-old boy was dead on arrival at Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim on Tuesday after he was pulled unconscious from a neighbor’s back-yard swimming pool, authorities said.

The child apparently had fallen in the pool with his 4-year-old sister, police said. Their 6-year-old brother pulled the sister out of the pool but was unable to rescue the 3-year-old, police said.

Paramedics were called mid-afternoon to a house in the 3600 block of West Oak Avenue, police said. The house is for sale and unoccupied, and the gate that the children apparently used had a flip-type latch on the outside that “anybody could have opened,” deputy coroner Pat Lorey said.

“It’s bad enough as it is, but it could have been worse,” a police spokesman said.

The child’s name was not released Tuesday evening.

After rescuing his sister, the 6-year-old ran back across the street to his house to get his father, Lorey said.

Although the children’s own house is fenced, he said, “their mother was saying the 6-year-old had been getting out of the yard to play with the neighbor kids.”

The drowning is the fifth this year involving a child in a residential swimming pool in Orange County:

* In Garden Grove, 4-year-old Jake Hancock died nine hours after he was pulled from his grandmother’s pool Thursday. She had put him to bed for a nap at 2 p.m. and discovered him missing when she went to check on him 35 minutes later. She found him at the bottom of the deep end. He was taken to Garden Grove Hospital and Medical Center and pronounced dead at 11:35 p.m.

* In Santa Ana, 3-year-old Francisco Ugalde, who had left his mother’s sight for less than five minutes, drowned in the family pool June 19. The child got to the pool, surrounded by a four-foot fence, through a gate with a broken latch. Someone had been trying to repair the gate that day, police said. He died at Garden Grove Hospital and Medical Center.

* In Westminster, 14-month-old Vivian Nguyen fell into a back-yard pool May 19 and died after lingering in a coma five days. She had been playing near her father who went to wash some dishes, noticed his daughter missing, then found her at the bottom of the pool. She died at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange.

* In Santa Ana in January, year-old Cruz Soria died 26 hours after he wandered into the back yard of his home and fell into the swimming pool. Family members doing chores did not see the toddler. He died at CHOC after more than a day on life support. He never regained consciousness.

Swimming pool drownings are the primary injury-related cause of death among children under age 5.

Six children drowned in Orange County last year, and 17 in 1993. Authorities warn that many children survive near-drownings but suffer permanent and severe disabilities.

There are 91,500 residential swimming pools in the county, nearly one for every 28 residents, or five times the national average.

The American Red Cross recommends that parents of children under 5 maintain constant supervision of them around water. Among other things, the Red Cross urges parents not to leave toys in the water, not to rely on rafts or inner tubes to keep children safe, and to enroll children in water safety classes.