One of Dylan Harrison’s fellow-students on the day the 12-year-old girl died in a Texas lake has opened up to Fox News about what he witnessed on and after the fatal dive.
The NAUI entry-level certification class, organised by dive-store ScubaToys, was being held at the Scuba Ranch inland site in Terrell.
The student, Ted Sickels, was described as seeking US open-water diver certification even though he already had decades of diving experience in the Caribbean.
He said that instructor William ‘Bill’ Armstrong had arrived late with his wife, appearing “kind of hurried” and not “joking around” as much as he had been on previous classroom sessions.
Sickels was unaware at the time that his instructor had just come from working an overnight shift as a security guard, following his previous day’s regular stint as an assistant chief deputy sheriff two counties away. The open-water class was set to run all through the Saturday, with Armstrong assisted by divemaster Jonathan Roussel.
Buoyancy struggle
The eight students followed a buoy-line down to a first and then a second platform at 5m. Sickels says he saw Dylan struggling with her buoyancy and gripping the platform railing to stay down.
He did not refer to her being buddied with another 12-year-old, as mentioned in earlier accounts, or to the visibility, which was said to have been poor.
Sickels was the diver who caused the group to be brought back to the surface soon after descent, after he says he had misunderstood a signal from Armstrong and ascended.
The instructor then told the class to descend to 5m to simulate a three-minute safety stop but, instead of an orderly descent on the line, this time all the divers resubmerged at once. This would support earlier reports that the second descent had been unco-ordinated.
After a headcount revealed a student to be missing and a perfunctory search, the divers ascended again. Armstrong went back down to search for Dylan around the platform, while Roussel and the other trainees looked out for bubbles.
Armstrong resurfaced to report that Dylan was not on the platform, then went back down to see if she was beneath it. Back at the surface, he asked one of the trainees to phone for an ambulance and then left the water, said Sickels.
He recalled Dylan’s mother screaming: “Why are you not doing anything?” and Armstrong allegedly replying: “We’re doing everything we can. She’s got plenty of air in her tank. As long as she keeps her regulator in her mouth we will find her and she will be OK.”
Armstrong was then said to have driven off in a car to seek help. “He is a certified rescue diver – why is he not here leading?” asked Sickels, agreeing that if Dylan had been accompanied down the line by one of the professionals “none of this would have happened”.
Two resignation letters
Instructors on a nearby training session launched their own search after their trainer, dive-school owner Richard Thomas, learnt that a diver had gone missing.
They found Dylan’s body at a depth of 13m within seven minutes, though it remains unclear how long a gap there had been between the start of their search and the initial headcount.
Fox 4, which has led the way in investigating the fatal incident, has also learnt that Armstrong submitted a resignation letter to Collin County Sheriff’s Office on 20 October. This was the day Fox ran the story of Thomas finding Armstrong out of the water ‘bone-dry’ insisting that he had done nothing wrong, even while the search for Dylan was still underway.
Then, as the Texas Rangers were reported to be assisting with the investigation, Armstrong had submitted a second letter altering his retirement date from 31 October to “effective immediately”.
David Concannon, the lawyer representing the Harrison family, says that it took only 97 minutes from the time Dylan was declared dead before the local Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office had called her parents to say that it was closing the investigation.
The sheriffs later backtracked on this decision and the investigation has since been continuing. However there is still no word on the results of what should have been routine analysis of the dive-computers used on the dive by Amstrong, Roussel (who later said that he had lost his computer) and Dylan herself.
