At a swimming pool, a few seconds of inattention can mean the difference between fun and disaster.

So when a teenage pool manager repeatedly had to rescue a young child whose mother refused to supervise him in the deep end, she finally escalated the issue to her supervisor and local authorities.

But her attempt to prevent an emergency was about to make waves in the neighborhood HOA group.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

AITA? We called the cops on a lady bc she refused to watch her autistic son at our pool.

I (18F) am the manager at a pool. I have been the manager for 3 years (all the managers in this pool company are high school/college kids), and everybody in the community knows and likes me.

There is a lady named M and her son K; I’ve known them for two years. K is nonverbal and he has autism.

K sometimes causes trouble, but the pool staff does their best to be patient.

This means oftentimes when we tell him not to run and to exit the pool for safety break, he does not listen. That is okay with us!

There are a lot of disabled children who come to our pool, and we do our best to accommodate them, and his mother had been very cooperative with us until this year.

The mother quickly turned out to be the real troublemaker.

This year, she started allowing K to swim in the deep end unsupervised. She sits on the opposite side of the pool, not in the water at all, and her son is not within arm’s reach.

At first, I thought that maybe she could not swim, but it turns out she doesn’t want to get her hair wet 😐.

K is 4 years old and a very small boy, and the deep end is 4 ft deep, which is just deep enough for a small child to struggle.

And struggle he did.

When my pool opened this year, in the first week alone I had to jump in the water to save him twice because his mother was not watching him and he began to struggle.

His mother insists that he is able to swim because he is able to stay afloat on his own. While this is true, he does not have the endurance to stay afloat for long periods of time.

K’s weak swimming ability is beginning to put others in danger too.

When he gets tired, he often grabs random strangers or things to stay afloat and rest. This indicates to me and my lifeguards that he should not be swimming alone, because both times that he drowned were times in which he got tired and did not have anything or anybody to grab onto.

So the pool manager had some strong words for his mother.

After both times that I rescued her son, I spoke to M to discuss that she needed to supervise K to prevent this from happening again, and she insisted that he can swim by himself.

Obviously, he can’t, as I have had to save him twice.

So when the mother defied the rules once again, pool staff escalated the issue.

I told my supervisor about this, and the next time he visited my pool while M and K were swimming, he told her she had to have her son within arm’s reach or that she had to leave.

She neither left nor supervised her son, so he called the cops on her.

The cops escorted M out, and all the residents, and M made a huge stink about it on Facebook.

Now it’s become an even bigger deal with the HOA.

First of all, I don’t think I am ableist because I have never had this kind of problem with any other parents at the pool. Whether their child is or isn’t disabled, they will watch their kids if they can’t swim because that is common sense.

Second of all, I don’t know what is so “ableist” about wanting M to watch her son so that he stops drowning.

AITA? I wanted to prevent her son from drowning again, but now the neighborhood Facebook moms are mad about this and complaining to the HOA.

This pool manager was 100% just doing her job.

What did Reddit have to say?

This mother’s accusations really don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The trouble this kid was causing could have had serious consequences if he had been left unattended.

Maybe this mom and her kids need to stay away from this pool altogether.

This mom clearly needs to be reminded of her roles and responsibilities.

Sometimes being the “bad guy” is just part of keeping people safe.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.