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.
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.