Arizona police have released new details about the fatal May drowning of influencer Emilie Kiser’s 3-year-old son, including allegations that her husband placed a $25 bet on an NBA playoff game before the incident.
Brady Kiser, Emilie’s husband, was home with the couple’s two sons while his wife was out with friends on May 12 when Trigg drowned in the family’s backyard pool, according to the Chandler Police Department report unsealed on Friday.
The report states that the toddler was in the pool for around seven minutes before Kiser found him unconscious and took him out of the water. He died in the hospital six days later.
Police initially recommended that Kiser be charged with one count of child abuse, but the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office later determined that he would not face charges because there was “no reasonable likelihood of conviction.”
According to the report obtained by People magazine, Kiser called the police around 6:41 p.m. local time and told the responding officer that he had lost sight of Trigg for around three to five minutes before he found his son in the pool.
In a series of subsequent interviews, Kiser detailed his day to officers after his wife left to meet friends, including feeding his kids dinner and sitting on the couch while watching Game 4 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics.
“I didn’t have a clock, obviously,” Kiser told police in an initial interview about how long he lost sight of his son. “I don’t know the exact time, but it was moments, it wasn’t minutes, it was moments. It wasn’t that he had been out of sight for long.”
Surveillance footage, however, showed that Trigg was unsupervised for at least nine minutes, and had been in the water for at least seven before Kiser found him, the report states. The footage also showed that the toddler “did not go into the water intentionally, rather he tripped and fell in while playing with an inflatable chair,” the report states.
Around that same time, according to Kiser’s phone data detailed in the report, “a $25 wager was placed on Jayson Tatum scoring more than 40 points” on a sports betting app at around 5:14 p.m. local time, before his wife left. The report states that the “wager was a winner, paying $102.50.”
The report states that the incident was the result of Trigg being “unsupervised while playing around the unsecured pool and unable to swim.”
According to the police report, Emilie Kiser said she left the house at 6 p.m. local time and arrived at the restaurant 20 minutes away from their home at 6:32 p.m., which the report also says is nearly the same time Trigg Kiser fell into the pool, based on video evidence. In the reports from officers, police said Brady Kiser first told police he left Trigg alone between 3 and 5 minutes before he discovered the toddler unconscious in the pool. He is quoted to have said, “I didn’t have a clock, obviously, I don’t know the exact time, but it was moments, it wasn’t minutes.”
According to a General Offense Report, video evidence shows Brady Kiser left the toddler unsupervised in the backyard for more than 9 minutes and that the toddler was in the water for 7 of those minutes. The police report said Trigg was unsupervised between 6:29 p.m. and 6:39 p.m. local time.
“Brady’s statements do not match what is seen on the video; he did not accurately describe one thing did after he went outside. This leads to the conclusion that Brady was not aware of what was doing and was not watching him,” detective Michael Rietz from Chandler Police concluded in the General Offense Report.
Brady Kiser, in an interview with Rietz, said it was “not the norm” for Trigg to be outside unsupervised. When asked why he didn’t look outside for those 10 minutes, Brady said there was “no outside distraction other than my newborn baby.”
Police noted an NBA playoffs game was playing when they arrived on scene. Brady Kiser had placed a single bet on the game at 5:14 p.m. local time, over an hour before the incident, according to data obtained via a search warrant to the sports betting platform DraftKings. He told the detective in a later interview that he was not subsequently on his phone and that his “focus” was on his newborn.
The General Offense Report concluded this “tragic incident” was the result of Trigg “being in the backyard unsupervised while playing around an unsecured pool and unable to swim.” Based on the video footage, Trigg “did not go into the water intentionally, rather he tripped and fell in while playing with an inflatable chair.”
