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The grandfather who was with his 18-month-old granddaughter when she died from an open window on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship was sentenced to three years probation on Monday, according to the Ministry of Justice of Puerto Rico.
Salvatore “Sam” Anello, of Valparaiso, Indiana, pleaded guilty to negligent homicide last year after his granddaughter, Chloe Wiegand, fell through an 11 story window from the ship docked in San Juan, Porto. Rico, in July 2019.
Anello initially pleaded not guilty, but last February he said he was going to plead guilty so his family could start to come out of the tragedy. The plea deal allowed Anello to avoid jail time and serve his sentence in his home state, said Michael Winkleman, a lawyer for the Wiegand family.
Chloe was with her mother in a children’s water park on the 11th pool deck. Her mother had to deal with another case and asked Anello to watch her, according to an ongoing lawsuit the family filed in December 2019 against Royal Caribbean Cruises.
The family allege the cruise line was responsible for Chloe’s death, a claim the company has strongly denied. Royal Caribbean did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
The lawsuit said Anello was “keeping a close watch on ‘her granddaughter’ when Chloe walked over to a nearby glass wall.” Anello followed and put the girl in the window so she could knock on the glass but she slipped out of her hands and fell through the open window.
Anello has said on several occasions that he did not know the window was open, while the cruise line posted images which it said proved Anello leaned out the window and therefore knew she was open. Winkleman said the images were “misleading”.
In July 2019, Chloe’s mother Kimberly Wiegand said it was confusing that there was an open-air window on an 11th-floor pool deck. “There are a million things that could have been done to make this safer,” she says.
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