Usher Raymond’s 5-year-old son is out of the hospital a week after a near-fatal swimming pool accident, his mother’s lawyer said Tuesday.
Usher Raymond V was rescued and resuscitated by a sound tech worker who dove into the pool to free the child from a drain at the music mogul’s Atlanta home on August 5, according to police.
He was rushed by ambulance to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta hospital, where he was treated until his recent release. The lawyer did not reveal any details of his injuries.
“I don’t know if my son is going to have a brain defect,” Tameka Foster Raymond testified Friday at a hearing in which she asked a judge to grant her temporary custody of the two sons she has with the singer. Usher has primary custody of the children. “I don’t know if his heart is operating correctly. I don’t know if my son’s going to be 100% the boy he was before this incident.”
A judge rejected Foster Raymond’s emergency request, finding that the pool mishap was not crisis situation requiring that Usher’s two children be taken from him.
Usher’s ex-wife argued that the boy’s aunt, Rena Oden, who was caring for the child at the time of the accident, is incapable of keeping up with the two children. Foster Raymond testified that she does not trust the childcare of Raymond’s aunt.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge John Goger did not agree.
“What happened here was an awful accident and … I’m not certain that had any single person been at the poolside that one person could have done any better than Ms. Oden. And Ms. Oden did impress me as a capable caregiver,” Goger said. “Based on the evidence I heard, not one person could have done any better than Ms. Oden.”
The judge instructed Usher to keep his ex-wife informed about his whereabouts and who is taking care of the children.
Usher, as he is known in his career as a singer and actor, testified that he waited an hour to inform his ex-wife that their son had nearly drowned in a swimming pool accident because “the first thing to do was to respond to the emergency. … My son was hysterical and in the back of an ambulance.”
Foster Raymond also said Usher does not keep her informed about what is going on in the children’s lives.
“They come home with bags of medicine. I don’t know why or what illness or who’s taking them to the doctor. … He doesn’t confer with me regarding anything, nothing,” she told the court.
Usher won primary custody of the couple’s two children, Usher V and 4-year-old Naviyd, last year after a bitter court fight in which Foster Raymond accused the singer of being an absentee father.
Foster Raymond filed in May for a custody modification. That case hadn’t been heard by the time the swimming pool accident happened Monday, so Foster Raymond filed Tuesday for an emergency hearing on the matter.
Usher’s former stepson, also Foster Raymond’s son, died in a watercraft accident on a north Georgia lake last year.
CNN’s Nischelle Turner contributed to this report.
Alan Duke | CNN
