The controversy surrounding the still-unexplained death of 12-year-old Dylan Harrison in a Texas lake in August has taken another disturbing turn with the surfacing of an eight-year-old video clip.
It shows the owner of ScubaToys.com, which would later organise Dylan’s entry-level training, referring in an unguarded moment to the number of trainee deaths the dive-shop could survive without consequences.
It was John Banks, a former regional director of NAUI, the agency that provides training courses for ScubaToys, who shared the video with Fox 4. The TV station has led the way in investigating Dylan’s death at the Scuba Ranch inland site in August.
ScubaToys is a family-owned business in Carrollton, Texas and claims to be one of the USA’s largest dive-shops. The video shows owner Joe Johnson and his wife Sandy addressing instructors in the store with, in shot, a regional director for another training agency, NASE.
In the clip one of the unseen instructors is heard advising Johnson to take lawsuits seriously, warning him that regulator warranties can become void if specified mouthpieces are not used.
Johnson replies: “All I know is we’ve killed what? Four people? Five people? And we’ve never even done a deposition. Our insurance company just settles. John Witherspoon says we can kill two people a year, ‘we are fine’.”
When his wife interjects: “We don’t want that to happen”, Johnson says that he was “just kidding”. But the words: “Challenge accepted!” can then be heard from among the instructors.
Video sent to NAUI
The insurer referred to is reported to no longer be in business. The shocked instructor who had made the recording later stopped working for ScubaToys but sent all 45 minutes of footage to John Banks, himself a former ScubaToys instructor.
Banks says he had expected NAUI to withdraw support from ScubaToys after passing the video on to its then-CEO via a training standards officer, but he later learnt that the footage had been deemed “not actionable”.
Banks, who worked for NAUI as a course director trainer and member of the board of directors until 2020, says he felt compelled to share the video now after seeing recent reports on Dylan’s death.
“I’ve known Joe [Johnson] a lot of years, I don’t know what would have caused that level of indifference about student safety,” he told Fox 4, which has received no response to requests for comment from ScubaToys or NAUI.
How Dylan went missing
Dylan Harrison was one of eight students on an open-water certification dive at the Scuba Ranch facility on 16 August with instructor William Armstrong, who also works as a deputy sheriff, and divemaster Jonathan Roussel. She was buddied with another 12-year-old.
Following an aborted descent to a 5m platform in poor visibility the group resurfaced, but according to at least one of the trainees the second descent was unco-ordinated, which was when Dylan went missing.
No immediate search appears to be have been launched, but when instructor-trainer Richard Thomas who was working nearby learnt that a young trainee was missing he sent his instructors to look for her. One of them found her 13m deep seven minutes later, though by then it was too late to save her life.
Thomas then reported finding Armstrong “bone-dry” away from the scene, the instructor insisting that he had done nothing wrong. “He should have never left the water,” commented Banks. “You are the last to leave the water.”
Pointing out that scuba-diving is self-regulated, he added: “We have spent years and decades doing it the right way. What I’m seeing is a transition to what has happened. It could become normal if we don’t fix this.”
Texas Rangers get involved
According to the Harrison family’s lawyer David Concannon, the local Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office had waited fewer than 100 minutes after the girl was pronounced dead before informing her relatives that the case was closed.
The sheriffs later insisted that the case remained open but Concannon was told that the two dive-professionals’ computers would not be analysed and later that the divemaster had lost his. No information has been forthcoming about Dylan’s own computer.
Amid mounting criticism of the apparently lukewarm investigation the Texas Rangers, a law-enforcement agency with state-wide jurisdiction, are now reported to be “assisting” Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office.
Meanwhile, more than two months on from the fatal incident the Scuba Ranch has issued a statement distancing the lake venue from the training operation.
“Immediately after this event occurred, out of an abundance of caution, we permanently suspended the instructor from teaching at our facility,” it says of Armstrong, adding that ScubaToys was also suspended from training at the lake pending the results of the official investigation.
“This step was taken solely to ensure that safety remains the top priority for divers while at the Scuba Ranch,” runs the statement. “We do require that all instructors using our facilities follow recognised scuba safety standards outlined by their credentialling agency, as well as professional judgment, to train students safely.”
UPDATE 28 October 2025: Armstrong resigns, NAUI speaks.
When my 10YO got certified 1:1, it was a deal breaker if I wasn’t allowed as an observer on every one of his dives. They liked the $$ more than turning down private lesson$. He is 17YO now and just shy of his Master Diver, and I have been on every one of his dives. My non-diving wife said I have one mission – to never let our son out of my sight.
How in the world can this be non actionable? I can’t believe that the agencies are so stuck on the income from a shop to allow them to be so blase.
Something needs to change at a fundamental level in the agencies so there is accountability. When an instructor causes a person to take their last dive in training they obviously should no longer be allowed to be an instructor. If they were trained by a shop and that shop acts like it’s no big deal there is a major issue that the agency should address IMMEDIATELY!!!
I have seen people make poor decisions on their own, actually had a major one happen to a dive buddy on a dive earlier this year. She was in her 60’s and stated multiple times that, “I stopped counting after I got to fifty dives.” She was only open water certified and at the end of the first dive she was shivering as she was cold. I asked her if she was cold and she nodded that she was so we ended the dive a little early and got her out of the water. She rented a wet suit and some weight was added for the second dive.
We all hopped in to descend as a “group” which we all know means some people drop down and wait while others slowly descend to that point. Our maximum depth for that dive was 45 feet and I was near the edge of the group with my buddy being a few feet away. On the way down she maneuvered and ended up about eight feet away and ended up being the farthest person from the group even behind one of the two divemasters/guides. She never leveled off and ended up descending to 100 feet when she hit the bottom flat footed. As soon as she went past and got about ten feet below us I headed down after her with the guides staying with the group shaking their noisemakers.
When I reached her she looked like she was dazed and handed me her console. I showed her my dive computers depth reading that showed 100 feet and she was still basically dazed. At this point I tucked her console in and took control of her inflator while grabbing her cylinder and got her neutrally buoyant then began an ascent back to the group. Once we got there the guides acted like nothing happened and took off so we continued the dive. When the dive was over I told her she needed to get more training and she emphatically stated she was fine and again stated she, “stopped counting after she reached 50 dives.”
I have also heard about divers who trained in other parts of the world because it was cheap who went for more training and couldn’t properly preform a mask removal and clear. During my Advanced Open Water dives a young woman on a try dive didn’t understand how to properly swim with fins and looked like she was on a StairMaster talk about how she was going to travel to one of these places to get certified.
A dive agency should be able to prevent people like this from diving again without additional training or a training evaluation. A dive instructor should have “mystery shoppers” who take a class through them randomly every few years to evaluate how they are conducting the classes and ensure that they are adhering to minimum course standards. Instructors who fail should be required to retrain under an approved regional instructor. We should also be limiting instructor class sizes for Open Water courses when outside of a pool.
Something HAS to change because this is NOT ok.