Girl, 6, Is Dead After Being Found in a Water-Filled Bathtub, Police Say

A 6-year-old girl died on Friday after being found unconscious in a bathtub filled with water at a Brooklyn apartment, the police said.

The cause of the girl’s death was unclear. She had blood clots in her eyes when the officers found her, suggesting the possibility of a struggle, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation.

Officials did not identify the girl, and the police said Friday night that the investigation into her death was continuing. The medical examiner’s office was conducting an autopsy, a spokeswoman said.

Officers answering a 911 call for help at a home on Elton Street in the Highland Park section found the girl at around 1:30 p.m., the police said. Her parents were home at the time, the police said.

Emergency services workers took the girl to Brookdale Hospital, where she was pronounced dead just before 3 p.m., the police said.

Several hours later, two officers stood watch in the darkness outside the gated entrance to the small, two-story brick duplex where the girl had been found, on a residential block not far from the elevated J train tracks.

Investigators filed in and out of the building’s basement unit through an entrance under a staircase. A small Christmas tree was visible through a front window.

Helen Cunningham, who lives across the street, said she had seen officers and emergency workers arrive at the home at around 2 p.m. After a while, she said, they had brought out a small girl on a stretcher, her head visible from beneath the sheet covering her.

“I don’t know if she was alive,” Ms. Cunningham, 74, said.

She said that the man she knew as the girl’s father had climbed into a second ambulance that followed the one carrying the girl. Some time later, she said, she saw the police leading a young woman away in handcuffs. She said it was the second time in the past week she had seen officers at the address.

Ms. Cunningham said she knew the family as neighbors but not by name. “We’re not friends,” she said. She said that two or three children lived at the home and that she had seen the man taking them to school.

She said the family had moved into the home within the past few months from a building across the street.

The man Ms. Cunningham identified as the father worked at a Bravo supermarket around the corner, according a manager there, Emmanuel Pichardo.

Mr. Pichardo said that the father, who has worked at the store for two years and whom he knew only as George, had texted him in Spanish shortly after 4 p.m. to say he would not be coming to work because his daughter had been killed.

“I’m going crazy,” the father said in the messages, which Mr. Pichardo shared with a reporter. “I’m here until God gives a miracle. I don’t know what to do.”

Chelsia Rose Marcius and Maria Cramer contributed reporting.