A woman and her dog were found dead in a swimming pool at a home on Colonial Walk North in Estero, and the two Southwest Florida newsrooms carrying the story do not agree on which night it happened

A woman and her dog were found dead in a swimming pool at a home on Colonial Walk North in Estero, in the Colonial Oaks neighbourhood, after deputies were called to the address for a possible drowning.

Gulf Coast News, working from a Lee County Sheriff's Office report, says deputies responded at 6.47 p.m. Lee County paramedics arrived to find the woman floating face down, and in front of her the dog, described in the report as small, brown coloured and possibly a chihuahua, also floating and unresponsive. Life-saving measures were not successful.

The report relays how the call came in. A woman at the property was grilling when a man began knocking on the window in a panic. She went out to the pool and called 911.

A homicide detective responded and took over the investigation. That is worth stating carefully, because it is the detail most easily misread. A homicide detective taking on an unexplained or unwitnessed death is routine, and it is not an allegation. No agency has stated a cause of death, none has alleged that a crime occurred, no arrest has been reported, and nobody has been named or accused of anything.

The victim has not been identified. WINK News reports that authorities are still working to establish her identity and to learn more about what happened.

The two accounts do not agree on the night

The newsrooms carrying this story agree on nearly everything and differ on one material point. Both place it at a pool on Colonial Walk North, both attribute it to the Sheriff's Office, both describe the woman and her dog, and both put it at roughly the same hour of the evening, 6.47 p.m. in one account and around 7 p.m. in the other.

They do not agree on the day. Gulf Coast News says Wednesday night, which was August 26. WINK News says Monday, which was August 24.

This desk is not able to resolve that. The Sheriff's Office has published nothing of its own on the incident that could be read directly, and its public news pages return errors. The written report both outlets describe is not something this desk can see. It is fair to note that the Gulf Coast News account is the one quoting that report and the one giving a dispatch time to the minute, but that is an observation, not a finding, and neither day is asserted here as fact.

A third outlet, the Gannett newsroom publishing under the News-Press and Naples Daily News mastheads, ran the story on Thursday afternoon under a byline of Tomas Rodriguez. Its article is behind an access wall that this desk's tools cannot pass, so its headline is noted and nothing from it is relied on. That headline states a drowning flatly, where Gulf Coast News calls it a possible drowning. With no cause released by any agency, the more cautious wording is the one used here.

Nothing further has been released since Thursday. There has been no identification, no cause, and no arrest, and none is suggested by the silence in either direction.