UPDATE: POLICE CLARIFY LAST NIGHT’S GRAVENHURST DROWNING VICTIM WAS BRAMPTON MAN, 28, WHO WAS JUMPING OFF CLIFFS AT UNGERMAN PARK
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
GRAVENHURST — A man who drown last night while jumping off cliffs at Ungerman Park was a 28-year-old from Brampton.
Earlier witness reports claimed he was in a boat.
The OPP report this morning said they are investigating the Sunday, June 21, accident, which was reported police at 5:50 p.m.
Police and Muskoka EMS responded to a possible drowning at the Gravenhurst Wharf on Steamship Bay Road in Gravenhurst.
They say a group of people were spending time at the nearby Ungerman Park cliffs when one person failed to surface after jumping into the water.
He was pulled from the water and transported to the Muskoka Wharf by a couple who were boating nearby.
Unfortunately, life-saving efforts were unsuccessful and he did not survive.
Police are reminding members of the public about the dangers associated with water, always exercise caution and consider wearing a personal flotation device or lifejacket as a precaution.
Police also clarified, when asked late this morning, by saying the accident was not at the more popular cliffs next to the public swimming beach at the Lorne Street parkette.
Many people venture along the park path and along town shoreline property to where they can jump or dive into the water, as generations of residents and visitors have safely doneso before.
Witnesses originally said it was boating accident
An earlier version of this story late Sunday said witnesses claimed the man had jumped overboard on a boat.
And said efforts by friends and emergency services to save a young man boating on Lake Muskoka were unsuccessful.
The unidentified man died after being rushed to shore at the Muskoka Wharf public boat launch around dinner time on Father’s Day.
After the accident witnesses said three or four police vehicles and paramedics rushed to the dockside scene about 5 p.m. where they attempted CPR “in the boat for a long time,” said Elizabeth Tish Graham, who lives in the Greavette condos overlooking the dock near the “Tin Boathouses.”
She said it seemed like “a half hour,” before the man was eventually declared deceased and was covered up on the dock before being removed.
“Something must have happened out in the water.”
A boater loading his watercraft thought the accident happened just beyond the point near the Marriott Hotel.
Tish Graham added that from what she first saw — after hearing sirens — it looked like it involved “a great big huge pontoon boat that would carry 10 people or more.”
First she saw a “boat with a man and woman in it” arrive at the dock before going back out in the water with police, and returning with the pontoon boat.
That’s where emergency efforts took place.
“There were a number of men, maybe seven, who were with him at the shore,” she said. “They looked like they were in their early 20s. One of them must have been a relative because they had their arm around another one of them.”
“I was immersed in the thing. I never left the balcony. It took three hours,” and was the worst thing she has witnessed in 14 years living on the fourth floor of the blue building condos.
She said “then the men eventually went to the hotel.”
One man bleeding, another “sobbing”
Christian Venerayan, the front desk night clerk, said the men came in later and asked to use the washroom.
He said they were in there mid-20s or early 30s.
“One of them was bleeding and asked for help for cut on his (right) leg. I gave him a bandage from the first aid kit.
“Another man was sobbing.”
But they were not guests of the hotel and later left by a side door without passing the front desk.
Venerayan said they had told him “their friend had died” after he had “jumped off the boat.
“I asked him does he know how to swim. And they said ‘he doesn’t know how to swim.” And then he said as soon as he jumped in the water he got sucked in under the boat.”
Venerayan said they told him it was a “rental boat.”
“I saw them get off the boat and they didn’t look to have any life jackets on” that he could see.
“It’s terrible. You have to be careful.
“Summer has just begun and we have a casualty already.”
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