Yolanda George, mother of Christopher Gilbert, calls on police to make arrest after incident in Louisiana in April
The family of a 26-year-old Louisiana man who has brain damage after a friend allegedly pushed him into a lake despite him being unable to swim is calling on authorities to deliver them justice.
Christopher Gilbert’s family’s pleas came after he nearly drowned on 14 April while at a lakefront restaurant by Lake D’Arbonne in the northern Louisiana town of Farmerville.
Speaking to the local news station KSLA, Gilbert’s mother Yolanda George said: “A friend of his called. She was hysterical, crying on the phone. She told me that Chris had [fallen] into the lake, and he had been underwater for 20 minutes or so.”
George said her son – an aspiring medical doctor – was rescued and taken to a nearby hospital. She added: “The doctor called us in and told me that at that time, he was brain-dead, pretty much, and the rest of his organs were starting to fail, and that we had 72 hours on” life support, though Gilbert later regained consciousness and the ability to eat on his own.
Twenty fucking minutes.
How in the fuck do you let someone struggle against drowning for twenty fucking minutes?
Almost everywhere I’ve been, waterfront places like those have at least a life ring or something.
Believe it or not, this is kinda a Louisiana thing. I moved to New Orleans and a story had dropped about a three year old drowning in a lake in front of their family. It turned out that nobody knew how to swim and they were genuinely too scared to get into the water and save their young family member.
If you don’t know how to rescue a drowning person you put yourself in tremendous risk if you attempt to save someone. A drowning person will claw at anything to try and remain above water and that usually means the rescuer is going under with them thereby drowning them both.
If I had done this you bet your ass I would have jumped in to help my friend not die even if it was risking my life…but I assume anyone who would jump in after someone wouldn’t push them in to begin with.
And your friend would have killed you. A drowning person isn’t thinking rationally. They will grab you and hold you under the water with all of their adrenaline fueled strength to try to stay above the water. If someone is drowning you never get in the water with them unless you are specifically trained for that and even then it is a last resort. Drowning is one of those situations where if you just run in and try to help without thinking then the ambulance just winds up hauling away two corpses.
What you should be doing is finding anything that floats and throwing it to them or finding something long that they can grab onto so you can pull them to shore. For example tie a couple towels together to make a rope or dump out a cooler and throw it in for them to grab.
Well, if it’s not complete incompetence, it’s attempted murder.
It wasn’t for swimming, it was a location for eating. They probably had signs that said no swimming, or swim at your own risk. The restaurant is not responsible, but the person who pushed him would have gone in after him and saved him.
Not defending the asshole, but someone jumping into a deep body of water to save someone else usually results in two people dead. A drowning person will pull someone else down through sheer panic. That’s why most lifeguards will go in with a flotation device to keep them afloat.
Ideally, there should have been a life preserver nearby, barring that, a rope.
Again, fuck that “friend.” May this haunt them the rest of their life.
The thing to do is let them pass out, and then collect them, ideally very quickly after they lose consciousness. If you haven’t been explicitly trained in rescue, this is the only option you have which you will survive, unless you can find some way to reach them without getting in.
I didn’t even know it was possible to bring people back from 20 minutes underwater!
They last even longer if the water is cold. In the winter people have been brought back after spending several hours dead under the ice after falling through and drowning. I think the record for someone who made a full recovery is 17 hours.
There’s a saying in EMS, “They’re not dead until they’re warm and dead.”
That’s amazing! 17 hours! There must be serious brain damage though, like in this poor man’s case.
Seriously. If I’m unconscious for that long, please do not bring me back.
Nope, it can be minimal to no brain damage at all, which is what makes these so wild to see. The cold keeps their brain and other cells from needing much oxygen, and thus keeps them from dying.
That’s amazing. The body is a really incredible thing. Maybe one day we’ll understand how that works and perfect it for putting people in long-term suspended animation.
Well, we don’t have anything for long-term suspension, but we do use it sometimes in cases of cardiac arrest.
It’s called the ‘mammalian diving reflex’
It’s triggered when ice cold water hits the back of the neck, and blood flow is redirected to just between the brain and heart, keeping the brain alive.
So it’s not the temperature of the water, per se., other than triggering the reflex.
What a great “friend”
a friend allegedly pushed him into a lake
No that was not a friend, that was a psychopath doing harm to others with no thoughts of consequences.
That action is assault, and should be punished as such.EDIT: To those that defend the girl:
We know, She pushed him, and she didn’t rescue him or even attempt it , and we also know she took a very long time to call for help.- He was 26 years old med student, so this is not children playing.
- She pushes him in the water.
- She fails to rescue him. There’s not even anything about an attempt.
- She waits a very long time to even call for help.
- The family want’s justice, and say “We are saying that it was a criminal intentional push into the lake.””
So based on that make your own judgement on whether she is more likely to be a psychopath than not. She sure behaved like one.
Not every bad decision makes a person a psychopath. You’re diluting the meaning of that word.
Shoving a friend into a pool or a lake is pretty common young person behavior. Odds are she feels extremely guilty now. That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t face consequences for what she did, but there is no indication that she is a psychopath.
Teach your children to swim.
I agree that everyone should know how to swim. Unfortunately, it’s pretty common for those in poverty to never learn because they have fewer opportunities.
Odds or this person wasn’t from a background of poverty, considering that he was studying to be a doctor, but it is a common problem in the US.
Do you not have swimming lessons in school? I hated them, the teacher, the chlorine. I don’t like swimming, but if I needed to, I can. I mean, water makes up how much of the earth’s surface, seems strange to ignore.
Most public schools do not have pools.
It’s funny cos I think of (areas like ca) that have pools galore in the backyards so it would lead to you to expect schools to have them. Scratch that, it’s not funny.
Florida has tons of pools too, and I actually got swimming lessons in elementary school, we had mini field trips for a week walking to a community pool and teaching everyone to, at a minimum, float on their back and tread water.
This should be mandatory before second grade. Every major city has public pools. How are we not requiring this to be part of every public school’s curriculum? It’s 2024. You know, those finger painting projects were fun, but they aren’t going to save as many lives as swim lessons.
Except for the part where the guy can’t swim, and she shoved him in the water regardless. And didn’t try to rescue him and took 20 minutes to call for help, and the family believes it was malice. These were not children playing, he was 26 years old.
This is all in the article, and I find it astonishing that people feel a need to defend her, when she basically killed that man, by behaving irresponsibly on 3 counts. there is basically nothing of the original person left.
You don’t know she knew he couldn’t swim, you don’t know what happened. Maybe they were both messing around pretending to shove and then it went too far.
Youngpeople do stupid things all the time, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not.Once again, shoving a friend into water does not make you a psychopath even if you know they can’t swim. It makes you an idiot, for sure. But that’s not psychopathy.
I was defending that
Sorry, I misread. Thank you for supporting proper use of that word. Everyone likes to just jump to ‘psychopath’ these days.
But we do know, He was 26 years old, so this was not children playing. She pushed him in the water, but didn’t rescue him, and we also know she took a very long time to call for help. So maybe base this on what we know instead of what we don’t know and speculation on what happened.
- He was 26, so these were not children playing who didn’t know what they were doing.
- She pushes him in the water.
- She fails to rescue him. There’s not even anything about an attempt.
- She waits a very long time to even call for help.
- The family want’s justice, and say “We are saying that it was a criminal intentional push into the lake.””
So based on that make your own judgement on what kind of person she is.
It was probably one of those morons who said “this is how my parents taught me! Hyuk hyuk” and then pushed him in.
People have tried that on me, knowing I can’t swim, and I almost got physical when they’d “pretend” to push me in the deep end. It just makes me wary around them near the pool, because I can actually fucking die if I fall in.
You might consider taking swimming lessons, my dude. Also, fuck those people.
A local place wanted $170 per lesson, and they recommended lessons twice a week. I need to keep looking but at $340 a week that’s a bit out of my range.
Do you have a friend who knows how to swim? It isn’t difficult to teach someone the basics of swimming for survival—floating, kicking, and a basic stroke to get to the edge. I know I’d be willing to teach any friend who didn’t know how for free, and I imagine a lot of other swim capable people would feel the same since it is such a safety issue.
Friends have tried but I’m not gonna lie, they fail because of me. I’m very scary when my feet leave the ground. Pool party? Yeah sure I’ll go, but once the water is neck level with my feet down, I’m going back shallow.
One time I was making real progress and some drunk person almost drowned, interrupting the lesson.
You can learn to swim in water that is shallow enough to stand in. And if being safe in the event of a pychopathic ‘prank’ is the primary concern, focus on learning how to tread water. Everything will seem easier once you know for sure that you can keep your head above water. Most people who are enjoying a pool or the sea are not actually swimming anywhere anyway.
Some people just don’t want to learn to swim. My mother is one of them. The whole idea gives her too much anxiety. I don’t really have an issue if they don’t want to get in the pool.
I hope you can find a way to learn that works for you. No need to leave the shallow end—even if you only learn to float, then you’ve learned to survive. Good luck! You’ll get this!
Have you tried water wings? I’m not joking, they’ll look silly, but shouldn’t be necessary for too long.
Wow, that’s expensive! Hope you’re able to find something more feasible. Good luck.
A local place wanted $170 per lesson
Wow that’s crazy, but not to worry, if you want to, you can learn yourself. There are lots of YouTube videos on it, practice in the low end, start learning to tread water. That should make you a lot more comfortable in the water.
As a child before we learned to swim properly, we used what we called dog swimming, where we basically just flap our arms downwards to push our heads above water, and splashed with the legs to push us forward. That’s enough technique to know how not to not die at least, and be able to move around in water.
When you get comfortable in water, swimming becomes easy, there are so many ways to do it, and it’s fun. Especially if you live near usable sea water.Fr, in the age of YouTube, no one has any excuses to not learn how to do most things other than laziness imo.
They night also consider getting new ‘friends’.
This is awful, no doubt about it. Out of curiosity, is it fairly common to not be comfortable with swimming in areas like LA? My parents had swimming lessons and recreational swimming as a part of my childhood from basically day one, so I think I take that for granted.
Swimming in lakes was not something I ever would have done when I lived in Louisiana as a kid. Pools are fairly common but gators make lakes pretty unattractive to swim in.
oh sheesh, I didnt even consider gators. Around here you basically just have to worry about cottonmouths and leeches, I can’t imagine having multiple different kinds of large predators to worry about. I can see how that would put a damper on the whole swimming thing
You worry about those too. I definitely recall when my mom thought my brothers were playing a prank on her and had put a fake snake in the house. Nope. It was a real water moccasin (cottonmouth). I did not go in bodies of water I could not see at least a few feet down in which meant I only went in pools.
I don’t like this Friday the 13th reboot
I’m shocked there is a lake with pedestrian access that is over 6 foot deep at the edge. Clearly a grown man had a problem with it.
Really? I’ve never seen an intentionally shallow lake edge before. More often, I’ve seen restaurants on docks that hang out over even deeper water.
