Another improperly covered septic tank found near site of tot's death

A team of county code inspectors today swept through a mobile home park where a 2-year-old child died after falling into an uncapped septic tank over the weekend, finding another improperly covered septic tank.

Officers inspected the septic tank where Luis Martinez was found Saturday, a day after the toddler went missing in the small mobile home park, where a dozen trailers form a small community around a teardrop-shaped drive on Silver Lane south of State Road 60 and west of Mulrennan Road.

The Silver Lane Mobile Home Park is owned by United States Corporation Agents, a Los Angeles company with a local office, Hillsborough County code enforcement officers said. At the listed address is another business. A spokeswoman for that business said the office only accepts mail for United States Corporation Agents. She would not comment further.

State division of corporations' online documents said the company is based in Los Angeles, but the address listed there is for a company that sells legal documents.

Code enforcement officers walked through the mobile home park this morning, checking septic tanks, electrical hookups and whatever else was covered by the county code. They found one violation, another septic tank that was covered by a rusting sheet metal lid. Metal or wood caps are allowed only as temporary measures, officers said.

Owners will have 24 hours to fix the violation, code enforcement officer Bill Langford said.

When the inspection was over, officers headed to a nearby park owned by the same company.

Dexter Barge, director of the county's code enforcement office, said seven or eight inspectors were at that park and another mobile home park owned by the same corporation. Officers spent about four hours this morning doing inspections, he said.

"Our guys did a sweep of the park," he said, "looking for obvious violations."

He said the property manager, Kenneth Winter, was there and told officers he would take care of any concerns. Winter could not be reached for comment Monday.

Barge said the tank where the child died was capped with a concrete lid and covered.

No recent citations have been issued at the park where the child died. The last time the property was cited by code enforcement was 2003, when a citation was issued for an improper permitting issue involving placement of a mobile home. Prior to that, officers cited the property in the late 1990s for accumulation of trash and debris, Barge said.

Hillsborough sheriff's deputies say an autopsy on the child was conducted over the weekend. "We can say there is nothing criminally suspicious about his death," sheriff's spokesman J.D. Callaway said this morning.

"We still have deputies out at the scene," he said. They accompanied code enforcement officers on their inspections.

Callaway said the death investigation will continue as detectives sort through what happened in the moments before the child's death, trying to establish a timeline of events and determining who was watching him.

The investigation will be completed by the end of this week, he said.

The Florida Department of Children & Families has never been called to investigate any complaints against the child's family, department spokesman Terry Field said this morning.

The agency is not involved in the investigation into Luis' death, he said.

A mass for Luis is scheduled for Tuesday at Nativity Catholic Church in Brandon. The family plans to return the boy's body to their home in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Luis wandered away from supervision Friday afternoon and fell through an 11-inch-wide hole into the septic tank.

Juan Martinez, 30, was outside talking to a friend as Luis played outside a neighbor's mobile home about 50 feet away, he said Sunday. Luis and another child were being watched by a neighbor.

An ice-cream truck pulled onto Silver Lane, ringing a bell. Martinez said the woman watching Luis and the other boy said Luis cried out that he wanted a treat. She told the child to go home. Martinez said he thinks the woman then went inside with the other child. Luis didn't return.

Instead, he ran around the mobile home next door and fell into the septic tank, Martinez said.

"If it had had its cover," Martinez said, "perhaps that wouldn't have happened."

Luis' parents initially thought someone had abducted him. Even after authorities arrived, the search-and-rescue dogs seemed to be following a trail on the street. They passed over the septic tank Friday.

About 400 volunteers showed up Friday and Saturday to scour the area around the mobile home park.

Luis' family moved to the mobile home park on Silver Lane last month. They came from Michigan and for the past three years have spent October to May picking strawberries in the Dover area, Martinez said.

The couple also has a 2-month-old daughter, Adelina Martinez.

The ground-level septic tank was capped and covered Sunday. It probably had been uncapped for several years, deputies said. Grass had grown over the opening, concealing it.

The hole was 5 feet deep and the tank was full of raw sewage.

Mobile home parks with septic tanks are inspected by the county health department and the problem of uncapped tanks is not prevalent, they say.

Typically health department inspectors check new tanks as they are installed, "and unless there are modifications," said health department spokesman Steve Huard, "we may never see them again."