14-Month-Old Boy Drowns in Back-Yard Pool : Accident: Child becomes the latest victim in a rash of drownings. He had wandered past a makeshift fence.

A 14-month-old boy wandered into his back yard with an older brother and drowned in the family pool Monday afternoon, becoming at least the sixth child to drown in Orange County this year.

The child’s mother, Laticia Valencia, 26, said she was in the kitchen cooking when she heard a family member screaming that “the baby was in the pool.”

Police said that shortly after 3 p.m., Sergio Valencia and his 3-year-old brother, Jesus, apparently made their way past a makeshift, 3-foot high fence and into the family’s back yard on the 8800 block of Joyzelle Drive.

As many as 10 people were in the house, but none noticed that the two children had wandered off.

Cergio Presardo, 13, the victim’s uncle, said he went to the back yard to get some rice from an outside refrigerator “when I saw (the 3-year-old) trying to reach for the baby to pull him out of the pool.” Cergio pulled the infant out of the pool.

Jesus said in Spanish: “The baby was in the water, and I saw him.”

Next door, 65-year-old Dean Wilkinson was on his patio when he heard the yelling.

“I looked over the fence. I could see water on the deck of the pool, and right away I knew something was wrong because I heard screams.”

Wilkinson ran next door and found Cergio calling 911. But the boy, speaking only Spanish, was having trouble, so Wilkinson took over, taking directions from the dispatcher for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. But he said: “It was difficult to follow the direction, because of the confusion going on” in the house.

Police said an officer arrived on the scene within a few minutes of the call and found the boy on the kitchen counter, unconscious and apparently not breathing. The officer performed CPR until paramedics arrived, and the boy was then taken to AMI Medical Center of Garden Grove.

Physicians worked for 35 minutes to try to revive him, without success. Sergio Valencia was pronounced dead at 4:13 p.m.

Just two days ago, a 23-month-old boy, Robert Camacho, drowned in Santa Ana after falling into his aunt’s swimming pool.

Garden Grove Police Lt. Chuck Gibbs said of Monday’s drowning: “The fact that (the family) had any kind of fence up at all will probably lessen the likelihood of any negligence being involved. It just seems to be a case of the children somehow getting out of the house and the mother not knowing it. . . .”