RHON­DOR DOWLAT

One teenag­er drowned off Monos Is­land while an­oth­er re­mains hos­pi­talised fol­low­ing an in­ci­dent dur­ing an out­ing Down the Is­lands on Sun­day.

Evan Han­nays, 17, a Fa­ti­ma Col­lege stu­dent, was iden­ti­fied as the vic­tim. His 15-year-old friend re­mains hos­pi­talised fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the two boys were at­tempt­ing to swim from a char­tered boat an­chored off Monos Is­land to a near­by beach.

How­ev­er, af­ter he got to shore that the 15-year-old no­ticed that Han­nays was miss­ing and had gone un­der­wa­ter.

It is be­lieved that the 15-year-old went back in­to the wa­ter and at­tempt­ed to look for his friend but he too got in­to dif­fi­cul­ties.

Per­sons on near­by ves­sels who were alert­ed to the mishap went to the as­sis­tance of the two teens but al­though they both were even­tu­al­ly found, Han­nays could not be re­sus­ci­tat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to an eye­wit­ness ac­count that was shared in a so­cial me­dia chat, the two were swim­ming from a char­ter boat in Tur­tle Bay to the beach.

“When the friend got to the beach he turned around look­ing for his friend. I was not aware all this was go­ing on un­til min­utes be­fore they found him un­der­wa­ter and pulled him in­to a dingy. From my view... a Span­ish boy was pump­ing his chest … for quite some time, then boat drift­ed to­ward...and they put him in the back of ... boat. Many peo­ple were pump­ing his chest and blow­ing in­to his mouth. I was above look­ing on. Even...took over till the Coast Guard took him... heard about 20 min­utes af­ter that he was in fact dead. So sad. It was so trag­ic. Can’t be­lieve that hap­pens. Nev­er wit­nessed any­thing like that. Sigh.”

This sto­ry will be up­dat­ed as more in­for­ma­tion comes to hand.