Swan Lake Girl
Dies Tragically

By John Emerson
SWAN LAKE — August 1, 2000 – A pleasant family gathering in the country turned to tragedy Sunday when a two-year-old drowned in a backyard swimming pool at her grandparents’ home in Swan Lake.
Kathrine Shepuyto, 2, had been playing alone in her grandparents’ bedroom for several minutes when family members noticed she was missing, said Sullivan County Sheriff Daniel Hogue. Her grandfather, Leonid Kagun, found her lying in the bottom of the four-foot-deep in-ground swimming pool behind Kagun’s home. The little girl was missing for only 10 or 15 minutes, Hogue said.
Sheriff’s deputies Mike Schneider and Daniel Sutherland were going past the house on Mount Hope Road on a routine patrol when a family member frantically waved down the passing patrol car near 5 p.m. The deputies immediately began administering artificial respiration in an attempt to revive the little girl, stopping only when they turned over the duty to members of the Swan Lake Fire Department and Swan Lake Ambulance Corps, who arrived at the scene a short time later.
For the next three hours, emergency workers and doctors at Community General Hospital in Harris, where the little girl was taken, struggled in vain to save the child’s life. She was pronounced dead at 8:05 p.m.
Hogue said the little girl had been asking all day to go swimming in the pool, but her parents had repeatedly told her no because it was raining. She apparently slipped out the back door of the house unnoticed and wandered over to the pool.
“There’s no crime here,” Hogue said, “just a tragedy.”