An eyewitness to a death at the municipal pool on June 29 has been disputing the official account of what happened, saying that lifeguards ran away when the victim needed rescuing.
Arthur Penn, 69, was pronounced dead from drowning after his body was recovered from the bottom of the municipal pool’s shallow end last week.
Although Parks Department Director Frank Carine and Police Director Mark Smith were unavailable for comment by press time, other employees for the city, in recounting the events leading up to the recovery of Penn from the municipal pool, said a lifeguard had seen Penn at the bottom of the 16th Street pool while making her rounds and promptly jumped into the water in a rescue effort.
Disputing the official account, Florence Lazarov, who was involved with the senior citizen exercise program at the time, said both female lifeguards ran towards the office seeking help, and that it was a non-lifeguard, Laura Donovan, who performed the rescue effort.
“I saw the two girl lifeguards on the far edge – the south side,” she said. “One was kneeling over the other, crouched. Then they went off yelling. At first I thought they had seen a rat or something. Laura ran around the pool and jumped in and got the man under her arms and pulled him out of the water.
Momentslater, according to Lazarov, male members of the staff showed up to help Donovan lift the body from the water. This was witnessed by a crowd of people who had gathered near the pool side by this time.
While Donovan could not be reached for comment, Lazarov’s husband, Harry, and members of the senior exercise class to which they belonged confirmed Lazarov’s account.
Emergency medical staff arrived soon after and began to pound on Penn’s chest and givehim mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“But you could tell right away that he was gone,” Lazarov said. Although the autopsy performed by the state Regional Medical Examiner’s office ruled the death as a drowning, Lazarov was not so certain.
“I know they said he didn’t die of a heart attack, but something seemed to happen to him,” she said.
Seniors said they didn’t know him to be part of any of the local senior groups.
“Nobody knew this man,” Lazarov said. “We’ve been going to a pool in Lincoln School for years and years. He was
not part of the group.”
Penn, however, was in reasonably good shape for his age, an advocate of exercise equipment and jogging, said those who had seen him exercising. One witness reported seeing him swimming laps prior to his apparent drowning.
Lazarov was concerned about a possible heart attack and the municipal pool’s lack of a defibrillator – a heart starting machine that gives electric shocks to the heart if it stops during an attack.
McCabe Ambulance Service, which responded to the scene, has been working with the police department to install these units in police cars throughout the city.