His little brother died in a storm drain. Now he’s fighting to make them safer.

It was a rainy July day and the boys wanted to play in the puddles outside.

As the sky opened above them, 13-year-old Mason Kearns and his older brother, Clay, waded in the ankle-deep water flowing down the hill outside their apartment complex in Mount Airy.

Clay, then 15, heard Mason say his foot was stuck on something. A moment later, Clay turned back and realized that his goofy, adventurous little brother had disappeared.

For a brief moment, Clay thought Mason was playing a trick on him. Then he reached into the water, scrabbling around a hidden storm drain at the base of the hill, and felt Mason’s arm.

In the endless, horrifying minutes that followed, Clay, his mother, Erica, and emergency responders tried with all their strength to pull Mason from the storm drain. But the water rushing toward the inlet formed a vacuum that was too powerful to overcome. Mason died during the 45-minute rescue effort.

Months later, Clay and Erica Kearns can still hardly believe that day was real. They talk about Mason in the present tense, like he could walk through the door at any moment. When one breaks down, the other takes over the story, and they lean into each other as they tell it.

“I wish, I wish, I wish I would’ve known that this was even a possibility,” Erica said, sobs breaking her sentence into pieces. “You see puddles in your front yard and you don’t expect them to swallow up your children.”

Still racked by grief, the family went to Annapolis last month to advocate for legislation that would require Maryland municipalities to cover storm drains with grates. They told lawmakers that Mason’s death had to mean something — and maybe protecting other families from this pain could be his legacy.

“No one deserves to lose their life and no family deserves to carry the trauma,” Clay told a Senate committee on Feb. 3, just a few days before what would have been Mason’s 14th birthday.

“There’s no point in delaying the change any longer,” Clay said through tears. “I know it can start here, because I refuse to let inaction take away someone else’s brother or best friend.”

The legislation, called Mason’s Law, has been heard by committees in both the Senate and the House of Delegates. Now it’s just a question of whether lawmakers will act.

Mason is far from the first person to die this way. The investigative news outlet ProPublica reported in 2021 that 35 people had been swept into storm drains in the previous six years. Twenty-one of those people died, nearly half of them children, and yet federal, state and local governments did little to make storm drains safer, ProPublica found.

Less than a month after Mason’s death, a 5-year-old girl died after she was swept into a storm drain in Florida.

“It’s not new,” Erica Kearns said. “People shouldn’t have to die for something to be done.”

Mount Airy took immediate steps to make sure its storm drains were secure after Mason’s death. The flash flooding that took Mason’s life on July 31 was “eye-opening,” said Mayor Larry Hushour. The town of about 10,000 people sits on a ridge and straddles the dividing line between Carroll and Frederick counties. Hushour never imagined it was vulnerable to flooding.

The downpour that day overflowed every stormwater pond in Mount Airy, sending water rushing toward drains like the one outside the Kearns’ apartment complex.

After Mason’s death, town leaders decided to inspect every open drain in Mount Airy, a task that took six months and included a review of more than 1,200 inlets.

“Obviously, when somebody in your town suffers a tragedy like this, you need to step up and take a close look at everything,” Hushour said.

The inspection turned up more than a dozen drains that needed grates, 24 loose grates, four collapsed inlets and seven areas that needed additional warning signs. The town is working to fix all of those problems, an endeavor that would cost close to $80,000 if contracted out, Hushour said.

The Maryland Municipal League supports the bill, but with tweaks to help cover costs that local governments can’t afford. The organization is asking for amendments to establish a funding partnership between the state and local governments, and for a longer timeline to make drain repairs. As written, the bill requires municipalities to install grates by June 1, 2027.

The MML also wants to clarify whether the legislation applies to drains on private property, like the one near Mason’s home. That drain has since been covered with a grate.

The bill’s sponsor in the Senate, Frederick County Democrat Karen Lewis Young, said she is seeking funding to help ease the cost of grating systems. She is also working with the MML to develop a set of recommendations for prioritizing storm drains. Storm drains in populated areas near where children play, for example, could receive attention first.

She is optimistic the legislation will pass this year. It has bipartisan support from Del. Christopher Bouchat, a Republican who represents Carroll County and part of Frederick County.

“There’s a lot of political will to make this happen,” Lewis Young said.

The bill also has support from Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, who visited Mount Airy and spoke with Mason’s family after a chance meeting with Hushour, who was piloting a plane that Miller flew on last summer.

Allison Eggleston, Mason’s aunt, asked Miller to help the family advocate for storm drain protections. Eggleston also did extensive research and organizing to help make the legislation happen.

With a background in civil engineering, Miller said she understands the importance of designing infrastructure to withstand the worst conditions.

“Yes, there’s a cost to this,” Miller said. “But the most important thing as public servants that we can do is to protect the public.”

Miller’s meeting with the Kearnses will never leave her, she said. The family’s suffering is palpable, and yet they are pushing to make Marylanders safer.

“I think we owe them more than just condolences,” she said. “We owe them change.”

Clay and Erica Kearns had to overcome their aversions to public speaking before they testified in Annapolis. They’re the more reserved members of the family; Mason was a lively risk-taker.

The teen was a well-known presence at a local skate park, where he taught himself tricks and made conversation with locals who sat and watched the skaters. His confidence grew in the year before his death, Clay said, and he was teaching himself all sorts of new skills, like guitar and even a little Japanese.

“He was really talented with everything he set his mind to,” Clay said. “He knew he was going to do it, and it was just a matter of how good he was going to get.”

Clay still smiles a little when he talks about his brother, though the memories are painful. His counselors at school told him to leave class whenever he needs to get some space.

Even though it hurts to talk about it, Clay knows his little brother would want him to advocate for change.

“The thing that made him the happiest was seeing other people happy,” Clay said. “He would not want this to happen to anyone else. He wouldn’t want anyone else to feel the way me and my mom and our family do.”