A female scuba diver died in Jupiter on Florida’s east coast on 6 June while on what was reported locally to have been a shark dive from a boat.
Reports citing Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office suggested that the woman appeared to panic while at the surface at a site near the Jupiter Inlet. She had gone under water and other divers had recovered her unconscious and brought her back onto the boat, where CPR was administered as the vessel headed back to the marina.
The alarm was raised and deputies and rescue units were dispatched to meet the boat at around 10.15am. The diver was taken to nearby Jupiter Medical Centre but she was pronounced dead at 11.07am.
Under investigation
Meanwhile, over the past month four snorkellers are reported to have died in the state in separate incidents. Three of them, aged from 56 to 63, were snorkelling in the Florida Keys and the most recent was younger, the victim of a boat-strike off Hollywood Beach on the Atlantic coast.
Benjamin Millspaw, 56, from North Carolina was snorkelling near Cottrell Key off Key West with a tour operator on 10 May when he was found unconscious and later pronounced dead.
On 26 May, 63-year-old Lecia Spriggs from Mississippi, again snorkelling with a commercial company off Key West but this time near Mule Keys, was found unresponsive and, after CPR proved unsuccessful, was declared dead at Lower Keys Medical Centre.
At around 1.30pm on 30 May Jurgen Wolz, a 62-year-old from Germany, was seen unresponsive while snorkelling from a tour operator’s boat at Grecian Rocks in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park off Key Largo. He was pulled unconscious from the sea, CPR was applied and paramedics met the boat, but Wolz was pronounced dead.
Finally, American Airlines flight attendant Kellie Williams, 31, is believed to have been killed by a boat-strike involving a vessel that has not been identified, while she was snorkelling in Dr Von D Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park.
Two anglers found her body on the evening of the same day, 3 June, after she had washed ashore near Hollywood Beach. According to the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, her injuries were “consistent with a vessel strike”.
Williams had been a keen scuba diver as well as an accomplished snorkeller, her parents told press. She had moved to Florida from California recently after getting married.
While her death is being treated as a suspected vessel strike, no official causes of death have been released in the other four cases, and all five incidents remain under investigation.
