Fellow Student Shares Child's Training Death Story

Twelve-year-old Dylan Harrison, who was assigned a buddy her age, died during a scuba certification class in a Texas lake last August. We issued a special report in November and followed up in the November issue with the whole story, explaining that after she did not surface with the group, the instructor looked for her briefly, then surfaced to seek help. Another diver found her several minutes later. Neither her nor the instructor's computer had been downloaded to get the dive details, and the divemaster assisting the instructor lost his computer days later on a dive in another lake.

Ted Sickels, who attended the class to get his U.S. certification after several years of Caribbean diving, shared his experience with FOX 4 News in Houston:

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The scuba class was scheduled to start at 8 a.m. "Bill Armstrong arrived after all the other students had arrived. It was kind of a hurried time. He arrived with his wife," Sickels said. "His demeanor wasn't as jolly as it was . . . when he was in the class.

"For the first submergence, the class used a line from a white buoy to go to a first platform and then a second."

Sickels noticed the girl struggling. "She was not neutral buoyant. She was having to hold onto the rail of the platform. She was not floating like the rest of us," he said.

Sickels said he misunderstood a signal from Armstrong, so he went to the surface. Armstrong told him, "'Because you came up, I had to bring the entire class up,'" Sickels said.

Sickels said Armstrong then instructed the class to descend 15 feet to simulate a three-minute rest stop. But this time it was without the line from the buoy to the platforms.

"He resubmerged the entire class as a group. The head count was off by one. Armstrong went back down to see if maybe she was on the platform. And I'm sitting there, I'm wondering, 'Okay, why are you going down there to see if she's on the platform? We're not over there on the platform.'"

After the class returned again to the surface, they looked for bubbles with divemaster Jonathan Roussel. Sickels said Armstrong came back up and said Dylan was not on the platform. "He went back down to see if maybe she was under the platform," Sickels said.

Again, says Sickels, Armstrong surfaced after an unsuccessful search and told someone to use his phone to call an ambulance.

"This keeps playing over and over in my head, every night . . . It was Bill standing on the dock and Dylan's mother screaming, 'Why are you not doing anything? Dylan is afraid when she is alone in the house in a thunderstorm!' And Bill turned around and looked at her and said, 'We are doing everything we can. She's got plenty of air in her tank. As long as she keeps her regulator in her mouth, we will find her, and she will be okay,'" he said.

Sickels said Armstrong then got in a car to look for help around the lake. That's something Sickels questioned. "Where in the hell was he going? He is a certified rescue diver. Why was he not here leading?"

Sickels said if Dylan had simply gone down the line with an instructor or divemaster, "none of this would have happened."

You can read the whole story here (with more information in the November edition). Undercurrent has edited Sickel's comments for brevity.