Bode and Morgan Miller spoke out about their 19-month-old daughter’s drowning to raise awareness for the leading cause of unintentional death for children 1 to 4 years old.
The Millers’ daughter, Emmy, died June 10, one day after paramedics tried unsuccessfully to revive her after the incident at a neighbor’s pool in California.
“It’s an obligation, to some degree,” Bode Miller said in a TODAY interview with Savannah Guthrie. “I think it does, in some way, help to heal, a little bit, that maybe we’re preventing it from happening to somebody else.”
Bode Miller is a six-time Olympic Alpine skiing medalist who covered the PyeongChang Winter Games for NBC. Morgan Miller is a former professional beach volleyball player. They wed in 2012.
“We have the choice to live our days with purpose to make sure that no other parent has to feel what we’re feeling,” Morgan Miller said.
On June 9, Morgan was with her kids at a neighbor’s house when she noticed she could not hear Emmy.
“All of a sudden it was just too quiet for me,” she said. “I stood up, and I turned, I walked right to where the boys were and I said, where’s Emmy? Before [son] Nate could respond, I turned around, and the door that leads to the backyard, that was closed, had this tiny sliver of light coming through the side. And my heart sank. I opened the door, and she was floating in the pool. I ran, and I jumped in.”
Morgan pulled Emmy out of the water and started CPR while a neighbor called 911. Bode was at a softball game and received a phone call, listening as paramedics continued trying to revive Emmy in an ambulance.
“In shock,” he said. Emmy died the following the day at an Orange County hospital.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t pray for the opportunity to go back to that day and make it different, but now we have this opportunity to make other parents’ days different,” Morgan said. “I want to remember her as my baby girl. She brought so much to our lives, and now she’s helping us bring so much to everybody else’s lives.”
