Engine issues water coming from where my spark plugs are.

I had a leak in my coolant coming from water pump and a bad thermostat.
My car was overheating frequently. So after I fixed what I thought could be
the problem I got the engine stop over heating, but once I turned the car off
and tried to restart it a few minutes later it would not start. The car was
turning over but just not starting. So, I had a friend come look at it with me
and we tried a lot of other things. Our one last measure we tried was we
removed the coil packs and the sparks plugs, and started to turn the car
over. This is when we saw that there was water shooting up from the engine
every time the engine cranked over. What could be the issue?