Lake Martin Topics: Boating accident account

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	Name:	Jim120 -
	Subject:	Boating accident account
	Date:	8/30/2008 11:28:55 AM

This account is from one of the boys who assisted in rescuing the Tatum victims of the boating accident:

Dear Family and Friends,

[introductory personal material deleted]

The following is an account of what one of my best friends [********] and I went through late Saturday night and Sunday morning of last weekend. It is not meant to be considered my single account, but it is rather a combination of my account, [**********] ’s account, and the accounts of a few others that we have talked to that were there.

My friend Bryant and I went to Lake Martin on the evening of October 8th. We were house and dog sitting for two US Attorneys that are very close with Bryant. The next day (Saturday the 9th) Bryant and I went over to a mutual friend’s house in the early afternoon and enjoyed an afternoon and evening on their ski boat waterskiing, wakeboarding, and teaching others how to wakeboard. I had been driving the boat and when the sun started going down we decided that it would be fun to take the ski boat back, go back to our own houses, regroup, cleanup, and then get picked up in a pontoon boat around 8:30 to head over to the Amphitheater to watch the concert that was going on. We wanted to enjoy the lake on such a nice night. We were getting close to Sinclair’s at Kowliga and it was already 8:45 and we knew that the concert was going to be over around 9:00 so we decided we would stop at Sinclair’s for a little while because we knew that it was going to be packed with people. I have been up at the lake many times this summer and Saturday had easily been the nicest day we had had on the lake all summer (it wasn’t 95 degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky). We docked at Sinclair’s and went up to the outside bar to have a few drinks and some appetizers. It was just a wonderful night with two of my close friends and four other friends that I had recently met.

At some point around 10:30 or 11:00 we left and went down to the dock to get into the pontoon boat to go home. We decided to take a scenic route home since the temperature was in the 60s, there were no clouds and we could see all the stars, and there was a half moon so visibility was good that night. We were cruising around the new area of Trillium when the CD player on our boat started skipping. So we turned it off, and when we turn it off we heard people in the distance screaming for help. We all looked and saw lights from a pontoon boat and people asking for us to stop and help and if we had a cell phone. Bryant and I had been in this situation before. At first we thought that the boat had either broken down, run aground, or ran out of gas and they just needed a tow. We asked them if it was an emergency and if people were okay. They said no and that there were people with serious injuries in the water. At this point our boat was at least 30 yards from there boat and we could tell things were in the water but we didn’t know how many and which of the objects were people. The man driving our boat didn’t want to get any closer because we didn’t know where in the water the people were so Bryant took off his shirt and I took off shirt and shorts (I had on underwear) and we dove in to help. With in a few minutes we had all TWELVE PEOPLE and I think two dogs back on the boat.

The scene on the boat was something like something out of a horror movie. The first person Bryant and I came to was a woman in her late fifties. She was unconscious and on her back doing the dead man’s float and had a life jacket under her head. We immediately grabbed the woman and moved here to the side of the pontoon boat. Someone on the boat reached down and stabilized her head and neck while Bryant and I hoisted her up through the side gate of the pontoon boat. Bryant then pulled himself up on the side and I swam around to the back side of the boat with a big man who was having trouble swimming to where I knew the ladder would be. This man was easily 6’3” and over 300 pounds. I got him up the ladder with what I believe was the help of a teenage boy and we set him on the back couch seat of the pontoon boat. He was visibly out of it but was conscious a responsive. By this time, we had gotten the lady laid on the floor between the captain’s chair and the left rear side couch of the boat. While I was attending to the lady Bryant looked down and their was a young girl holding an older man up above water. Bryant asked if he was hurt and he said yes and extended his arm out to Bryant. Bryant grabbed his arm and pulled him into the boat and quickly realized that his other arm had been completely severed in multiple places. Bryant let the man roll over on his back and we began trying to stabilize the victims.

Bryant took off his belt and the shirt of another person there and began applying multiple tourniquets to the man's arm. I was on the back of the boat with the woman. She also had an almost completely severed left arm and a cut on her head that was bleeding, but she was unconscious. I tied a tourniquet above the wound on her arm and held it with my right hand, and I held the cut on her head with my left. At some point during all of this, (I can’t remember if it was before or after we had started treating them) the boat became more chaotic. Everyone was hysterical from either injury or from the shock of witnessing what had just happened. There was one guy on the boat that was becoming belligerent yelling at the victims and asking them if they were okay. It seemed as if he was too drunk and too freaked out to handle what was going on (we later learned he was one of the people from the boat that hit the victims). At that point Bryant and I took command of the boat and told everyone to shut up, sit down, and make sure that we weren’t leaving anyone because we had to get these people off of the lake as soon as possible. We asked if the boat that we were on (the victims’ boat) would crank and they said yes. We then said that needed to get them to Sinclair’s where help would actually be able to arrive.

The boat was cranked and someone started driving the boat to Sinclair’s. Bryant stayed with the injured man and his wife keeping them calm and I stayed with the woman and her husband keeping them calm. We finally got to Sinclair’s after about 15 minutes of driving (but I am not sure about this because time kind of stopped). Once at Sinclair’s dock, we now had a little more light and we could see a little bit better. I pulled my hand away from the woman’s head (by this time her husband Kenny had told me her name was Sue) and I could see that the cut in her head was more of a gash and that her skull had been cracked. I could see her brain beginning to swell out of the skull and so I just held it. After about 15 or 20 minutes of working on these two people, the first EMTs showed up. I believe that there were only two. Donny the man with the severed arm had just stopped breathing. The EMTs started trying to revive Donny. I asked the EMT man on the boat what to do about Sue because her arm was hurt, her brain was continuing to swell, but she was still breathing. I felt like she needed immediate CPR assistance or else we were going to lose her too. He handed me a small oval breathing mask and asked me to start giving her life breaths. The mask was like what you see on TV minus the bag that one would squeeze to provide air flow, so I put my mouth over the whole and began breathing for her. It was very difficult because I was unsure how to do it right. I was having to blow out when she was breathing in and inhale when she was exhaling out of her lungs. This was confusing for me, because I knew that I was providing her with oxygen when I blew into her mouth, but I was also inhaling her carbon dioxide. This m