Lily Morales’ mother struggles to talk about her daughter as if she’s really gone.
On Tuesday while describing the outgoing, straight-A student who drowned Sunday less than a month from her 12th birthday, Leigh Ann Anderson unconsciously alternated from present to past tense. “She wants to be the teenage girl that she’s not,” she said. “But she was still an innocent little girl.” Anderson, 41, has similarly spent nights and days since Sunday evening alternating between anguish and anger over her daughter’s death. She believes Lily didn’t have to die. “I can’t believe she didn’t have a life vest on,” Anderson said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”
An autopsy performed Tuesday confirmed that the girl died from drowning.
On Sunday afternoon, Lily, her father, John Morales of Shasta Lake, and two family friends, a man and a 12-year-old girl, attempted to float down Clear Creek in flimsy inflatable rafts. nderson said Lily lived with her and Lily’s 21-year-old brother Zacharie Morales in Redding and only occasionally spent time with her father. In a comment posted Tuesday on Redding.com, Anderson said John Morales had told her that he was taking the girl to Brandy Creek Beach on Whiskeytown Lake, not that they were going floating on a river. A few hundred yards upstream of the Clear Creek Greenway recreation area off Clear Creek Road, the group approached a steep gorge filled with white-water rapids.
Witnesses said they tried to warn them their rafts couldn’t handle the raging current below.
It’s not clear whether John Morales was in the water with the others when they went into the gorge, but authorities say that Lily panicked and that her raft overturned in the white water. Her 12-year-old friend and the other man, neither of whom has been identified by authorities, were trapped in the gorge and were hoisted out of the canyon by a California Highway Patrol helicopter. The 12-year-old girl was the only one of the group wearing a life vest, sheriff’s officials say.
Bystanders say they spent 10 minutes diving into the deep pool where Lily submerged. When they finally were able to pull her out by her hair, they tried frantically to perform CPR on her lifeless body until sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and paramedics arrived.
At the scene Sunday, Morales was hunched over in anguish near his daughter’s body as a group of paramedics and firefighters performed CPR. Frantic and crying, he followed behind them as they carried her body to the ambulance. She was pronounced dead at Mercy Medical Center in Redding.
Anderson said law enforcement investigators came to her home Tuesday. She said they told her they were considering seeking child endangerment charges against Morales. Anderson said she hopes they will.
Shasta County Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Foster said his detectives are interviewing witnesses this week following up on concerns that the adults allowed the girls to go down the gorge at all, let alone without a vest for Lily. “A lot of people who kayak rapids around here won’t go through that gorge,” Foster said.
When reached on his cell phone Tuesday afternoon, John Morales said local media outlets “lied about everything.” He didn’t elaborate. "I’m going down to talk to a grief counselor right now,” he said. “I could barely compose myself enough to get a ride to get down here.” He said to call back later in the evening, but he couldn’t be reached again.
Lily’s friends, 12-year-old twins Gillian and Kelly Pringle, describe their classmate as a fun-loving girl who liked to joke around, tell stories and play bass clarinet in the Sequoia Middle School band. “She was really funny,” Kelly Pringle said. In the spring they traveled to Disneyland on a class trip and marched in a parade.
Anderson said her daughter, who also loved playing with her great uncle’s puppy and her cat Lilac, described the Disneyland trip as the best experience of her life. She blames her ex-husband for Lily’s death. “I told him he should have died trying to save her,” she wrote in her Redding.com comment. “I would have.”
Services for Lily are pending at Allen & Dahl Funeral Chapel in Redding. | 
