A BABY boy was found floating face down in the bath after his mother left him to extinguish a cigarette in the kitchen.

Karen Gifford left her sons, one-year-old Stephen and three-year-old Justin, in the bath when she remembered a cigarette was alight in the kitchen, an inquest heard.

When she returned to the bathroom she found the youngest toddler floating and lying face down in the bath, two days before Christmas last year.

Karen, who lived in Gibson House, Chattenden, told the inquest: "I put the children in the bath and they were splashing around and playing with their toys and I remembered I had left a cigarette in the kitchen.

"I sorted it out and then opened the cupboard and all the towels fell out so I picked two up as quickly as possible and went back into the bathroom and Stephen was floating on the water."

Panic-stricken Karen wrapped the boy up in a towel and took him next door to seek help before the ambulance arrived.

The tragic day took another horrific twist when the paramedic rushed the child to the ambulance; he tripped on a step and came crashing down on top of the toddler, fracturing its skull.

Pathologist Dr David Rouse said: "There were fractures to the skull far greater than that you would expect if the child had been dropped from chest height on to the ground. But these injuries did not contribute to or cause the death of the child."

Mid and North Kent coroner, Roger Sykes, said: "It was an unfortunate incident when the paramedic fell on the way to the ambulance but this did not cause or even contribute to Stephen’s death.

"It maybe that he was unsupervised for a short period of time but tragically it was enough for something to have happened whereby he came to be lying face down in the bath and thereafter there were no signs of life."

The coroner recorded the death as an accident.