Page 102 of Absorbed

“When did you discover that there was a second victim?”

“After Jessie was breathing, I ran over. That’s when I realized it was a drowned swimmer that the old man was trying to hold up.”

Ms. Lopez asked, “How did you know he had already drowned at that point? Did this affect your response to offer aid?”

Stacey’s heart started racing. “No! I mean, he had to have already drowned, right?” Stacey said, her voice becoming frantic. “When I first saw him, the other swimmer had his head above water, but his—Mr. Henderson’s—eyes were open and not blinking. His lips were blue.” Stacey started to shake. “But we REALLYdid everything we could to help.”

What if he WASN’T dead yet when I first went outside? Should I have gone to him first and left Mark to help Jessie on his own? Oh my god.

The lawyer looked up. “Take a moment if you need to, Ms. Chapman. I realize this must have been a very traumatic experience for you. I am only trying to get the details as clear as possible from all of the staff’s accounting of the events.”

The water in Stacey’s glass sloshed as she lifted it to her mouth for another sip. She set the glass down carefully and continued reading from her paper. “The old man was holding Mr. Henderson’sface out of the water by the time I got in to help. He appeared to already be dead, so I assisted Mark in backboarding Jessie and getting him safely out of the water before attending to the other victim.”

“Okay. Stop there for a moment, please,” the lawyer said. “Earlier you mentioned there were three swimmers in the pool. So far you have only accounted for two. Do you know where the third swimmer was when you observed the pool after exiting the restroom?”

“Uh, yeah. The lady in the purple suit.” Stacey closed her eyes and tried to think. “She was in the shallow end. Lane one. At the ladder, climbing out, I think. Later I saw her on the bleachers, and she spoke to me and the paramedic.”

“Okay, for now let’s stay with the moment you first saw the pool. Using whatever measurements are most comfortable to you—inches, feet, meters—please estimate for me the location of Jessie Thomas floating face-down in the pool, when you first saw him, as it relates to the tower he would have been in, the side of the pool where he was provided CPR, and also his proximity to where you saw Mr. Henderson’s body being held up.”

“Umm…can I—” Stacey pointed to the extra pens beside the lawyer’s notepad. She turned her notes over to the blank side of the paper. She began drawing a blocky, upside-down letter L, and marking locations on top of and around it, including a square she labeled T2 to represent the tower, and six stripesstretching the long arm of the L for the lane lines. As she moved the pen on the page, her nerves began to calm.

“So, if this is the pool, this is where the lifeguard tower Jessie would have been in is located, and this is the deep end where I saw Mr. Henderson in the water.” Stacey drew a small circle with an H in it in lane three. “I was standing here, by the guard shack, when I first saw Jessie floating around here in lane five,” She drew a circle with a J in it between the tower and the H. “Jessie was about twelve feet from the old man and Mr. Henderson. He was about twenty yards from the shallow end, and less than ten feet from the tower. It looked like Jessie dove in, maybe a little too shallow to try to go under the lane lines, when he hit the bottom.”

“Do you know how deep the water is where it looked like Jessie might have dove in?”

“It’s three-and-a-half feet deep under the tower.” Stacey could visualize the numbers on the wall in her mind. “And six feet at the far end where I saw the old man holding the guy who drowned…Mr. Henderson. So, maybe like…four or four-and-a-half feet deep?”

“Is there appropriate signage in that section of the pool that reflects that it is not safe to dive? Was safe diving depth and procedures part of your training?”

Stacey hesitated as she remembered the numerous times she and other crew members had dived into the water from one tower and swum to the other to cool off, even though they knew it was against the rules. She thought of Jessie’s and Mark’s tricks off the diving board. Jessie’s gainers off the side starting on the first day.

In her mind, Stacey could see the faded silhouettes of divers with diagonal lines over them, painted every few feet on the concrete around all of the shallow end of the pool.What depth do they end at?

“Yeah. It’s marked, and we follow safe diving procedures,” Stacey said. “I think Jessie would have just dived in automatically, though, trying to get to the swimmer quickly and avoid the lane lines, not even thinking.”

“Isn’t that exactly what your training was for, Ms. Chapman?” the lawyer asked. “So, you would think first about how to most safely protect yourself and the other swimmers if ever the need for a rescue was to arise?”

“Yeah, of course. But Jessie would have wanted to get to the man as fast as he could. And the end of the pool where I saw Mr. Henderson IS deep enough for diving. It’s just that Jessie was diving from too high up, and the lane lines were between them, and—”

“How high is the tower?”

“The platform where we stand is, like, five feet high, I think?”

“So, you are saying that from a height of at least five feet above the water’s surface Jessie dove into water approximately four feet deep?”

“Yeah. I think so, but….” Stacey squeezed her eyes shut, searching for Ms. Moreno’s words. “Sometimes the angle of the sunlight can affect how deep the water looks. Because of… reflection? No. Refraction. The lane lines would have created a vanishing point different from the direction of Mr. Henderson’s body, and that would have affected Jessie’s perspective. His depth perception would have been off.”

The woman looked up at Stacey and squinted her eyes. “Those are very technical terms, Ms. Chapman. Have you discussed this testimony with someone who may have been encouraging you to describe it this way?”

“What? Of course not!” Stacey said defensively. “I took art lessons this summer. Watercolor. And my teacher—Ms. Moreno—taught me about how light and distance and angles can affect perspective. I actually asked her more about it to help meunderstand why a kid I had to rescue a few weeks ago was hard to see at the bottom of the pool.”

The lawyer’s face became very stern. “There was another incident with a child needing to be rescued this summer at the facility on Seventh Street?”

Stacey’s trembling returned, and her voice lurched into a high pitch. “It was nothing like what happened Saturday with Jessie. It was just a little boy who couldn’t swim well. He went off the diving board when he shouldn’t have. It was no big deal, I promise. I got him out and he was totally fine.”

“Did you also jump from the lifeguard tower for that rescue?”

“Yeah. Of course. From Tower One. But, it’s the deep end and I went feet first.”

---