Lucio Vasquez / Houston Public Media
A Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputy stands near his patrol vehicle.
A woman was arrested this week in connection to the apparent drowning deaths of her two toddlers who were found to have cocaine in their systems at the time of their deaths in February, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
Laura Nicholson, 23, was arrested in Florida on Monday after being charged late last week in Harris County with two felony counts of injury to a child, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez wrote in a social media post on X.
Nicholson’s two daughters, who were 3 and 2 years old, were found dead in a swimming pool at their residence in Katy, a suburb west of Houston, on Feb. 11. Autopsies found that both girls had cocaine and the cocaine metabolite in their blood, court documents show.
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“We are deeply saddened by the tragic deaths of two young toddlers — sisters — in our community,” Gonzalez wrote on social media. “May these little ones rest in peace.”
Nicholson was arrested Monday in Lee County, Florida, and booked into a jail there, according to the sheriff’s office.
A defense attorney for her was not listed in Harris County’s online court records as of Tuesday.
Court documents show that Nicholson’s mother, the young girls’ grandmother, saw the back door of their home was partially open and then found the girls unresponsive in the pool when she returned home late in the morning of Feb. 11. Nicholson was asleep on the couch at the time, her mother told police.
Nicholson’s mother had previously accused her daughter of using cocaine as part of an investigation by children’s protective services, court documents show. After the toddlers were found dead in the pool, Nicholson’s father told police his daughter “falls asleep a lot and this causes issues,” according to court documents.
A pathologist with the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences could not confirm or rule out that the children died from drowning, with the pathologist telling police that “having access to the pool without proper fencing and locks was extremely dangerous and not providing adequate supervision to the children could certainly have been a contributing factor.”
According to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, 88 children drowned in Texas last year. That number marks a decrease from 2024, when 103 children died by drowning.