US man has brain damage, mother says, after allegedly being pushed into lake
US man has brain damage, mother says, after allegedly being pushed into lake
US man has brain damage, mother says, after allegedly being pushed into lake
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
What a great “friend”