Yolanda George, mother of Christopher Gilbert, calls on police to make arrest after incident in Louisiana in April
The family of a 26-year-old Louisiana man who has brain damage after a friend allegedly pushed him into a lake despite him being unable to swim is calling on authorities to deliver them justice.
Christopher Gilbert’s family’s pleas came after he nearly drowned on 14 April while at a lakefront restaurant by Lake D’Arbonne in the northern Louisiana town of Farmerville.
Speaking to the local news station KSLA, Gilbert’s mother Yolanda George said: “A friend of his called. She was hysterical, crying on the phone. She told me that Chris had [fallen] into the lake, and he had been underwater for 20 minutes or so.”
George said her son – an aspiring medical doctor – was rescued and taken to a nearby hospital. She added: “The doctor called us in and told me that at that time, he was brain-dead, pretty much, and the rest of his organs were starting to fail, and that we had 72 hours on” life support, though Gilbert later regained consciousness and the ability to eat on his own.
Twenty fucking minutes.
How in the fuck do you let someone struggle against drowning for twenty fucking minutes?
Almost everywhere I’ve been, waterfront places like those have at least a life ring or something.
Believe it or not, this is kinda a Louisiana thing. I moved to New Orleans and a story had dropped about a three year old drowning in a lake in front of their family. It turned out that nobody knew how to swim and they were genuinely too scared to get into the water and save their young family member.
If you don’t know how to rescue a drowning person you put yourself in tremendous risk if you attempt to save someone. A drowning person will claw at anything to try and remain above water and that usually means the rescuer is going under with them thereby drowning them both.
If I had done this you bet your ass I would have jumped in to help my friend not die even if it was risking my life…but I assume anyone who would jump in after someone wouldn’t push them in to begin with.
And your friend would have killed you. A drowning person isn’t thinking rationally. They will grab you and hold you under the water with all of their adrenaline fueled strength to try to stay above the water. If someone is drowning you never get in the water with them unless you are specifically trained for that and even then it is a last resort. Drowning is one of those situations where if you just run in and try to help without thinking then the ambulance just winds up hauling away two corpses.
What you should be doing is finding anything that floats and throwing it to them or finding something long that they can grab onto so you can pull them to shore. For example tie a couple towels together to make a rope or dump out a cooler and throw it in for them to grab.
Well, if it’s not complete incompetence, it’s attempted murder.
It wasn’t for swimming, it was a location for eating. They probably had signs that said no swimming, or swim at your own risk. The restaurant is not responsible, but the person who pushed him would have gone in after him and saved him.
Not defending the asshole, but someone jumping into a deep body of water to save someone else usually results in two people dead. A drowning person will pull someone else down through sheer panic. That’s why most lifeguards will go in with a flotation device to keep them afloat.
Ideally, there should have been a life preserver nearby, barring that, a rope.
Again, fuck that “friend.” May this haunt them the rest of their life.
The thing to do is let them pass out, and then collect them, ideally very quickly after they lose consciousness. If you haven’t been explicitly trained in rescue, this is the only option you have which you will survive, unless you can find some way to reach them without getting in.
I didn’t even know it was possible to bring people back from 20 minutes underwater!
They last even longer if the water is cold. In the winter people have been brought back after spending several hours dead under the ice after falling through and drowning. I think the record for someone who made a full recovery is 17 hours.
There’s a saying in EMS, “They’re not dead until they’re warm and dead.”
That’s amazing! 17 hours! There must be serious brain damage though, like in this poor man’s case.
Seriously. If I’m unconscious for that long, please do not bring me back.
Nope, it can be minimal to no brain damage at all, which is what makes these so wild to see. The cold keeps their brain and other cells from needing much oxygen, and thus keeps them from dying.
That’s amazing. The body is a really incredible thing. Maybe one day we’ll understand how that works and perfect it for putting people in long-term suspended animation.
Well, we don’t have anything for long-term suspension, but we do use it sometimes in cases of cardiac arrest.
It’s called the ‘mammalian diving reflex’
It’s triggered when ice cold water hits the back of the neck, and blood flow is redirected to just between the brain and heart, keeping the brain alive.
So it’s not the temperature of the water, per se., other than triggering the reflex.
What a great “friend”