911 Tape Depicts Call for Help

“There’s a big pool party here, and no one was paying attention for a minute,” an anxious Tommy Lee told a 911 dispatcher about a 4-year-old boy who drowned in his pool.

In the seven-minute tape released Monday by the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Lee requested an ambulance, then stayed on the phone while the dispatcher tried to determine whether the boy was breathing.

“He’s not breathing. He’s throwing up, but he’s not breathing,” Lee said at one point.

“He’s not responding,” Lee said a moment later.

Then, “He’s just, he’s just laying there.”

The boy, Daniel Karven Veres, was pronounced dead Saturday evening after he was found floating face down in the shallow end of Lee’s pool.

The son of television producer James Veres and actress Ursula Karven, Daniel was a guest at a birthday party for one of Lee’s two sons at the former Motley Crue drummer’s home in the mountains above Malibu.

“He was just a 4-year-old perfect child,” Veres, who didn’t attend the party, said Sunday. “It was a birthday party like a million other birthday parties and obviously there wasn’t enough help at the pool. . . . It’s inexcusable and just amazing to me.”

During the 911 call, the dispatcher told Lee to turn Daniel, who was vomiting, on his left side. After Lee said the boy was not breathing, the dispatcher began to instruct him in CPR and asked him to tilt Daniel’s chin back and blow into his mouth.

With urgency in his voice, Lee tried to relay the instructions to the people surrounding Daniel, but had difficulty getting control of the others.

“Everybody’s pressing on him,” Lee said. “There’s a bunch of . . . people here all, you know, doing their thing so I don’t know what to . . . “

Lee then gave the phone to an unidentified woman, who stayed on the line for a few minutes until an ambulance reached the home. The last words she said before reporting that the paramedics had arrived were: “His pupils are dilated.”

Paramedics arrived about 4:45 p.m. and took the boy to Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

The boy died from asphyxia by drowning, according to an autopsy performed Sunday, said Armando Chavez, a Ventura County deputy medical examiner.

The death was ruled an accident.