David Hickey was enjoying an afternoon run along the shore of the Ottawa River on Wednesday when he noticed a commotion in the water near Westboro Beach.
“I saw some splashing in the water. Then when I took one of my headphones out, I heard some screaming and there was a bunch of people gathering by the shore,” Hickey, 32, told CBC on Thursday.
Someone was in trouble about 20 metres from shore. Without pausing to consider his own safety, Hickey jumped into the water and swam out to help.
By the time he reached the struggling swimmers — a younger man and a boy — they had both slipped under the surface.
Hickey, a physiotherapist who describes himself as “not the strongest swimmer” despite taking a basic lifeguarding course as a kid, managed to grab hold of the boy and began paddling backward toward shore.
Realizing the man was still in distress, Hickey told him to hang onto the child, then pulled them both to safety.
That’s when Hickey discovered there had been a third person in the water — the boy’s father, 42-year-old Rowell Navarro.
Navarro was eventually pulled from the water, but despite extensive resuscitation efforts he was later pronounced dead in hospital.
The younger man, identified by police only as a “quick-thinking member of the public,” had jumped into the river to save the father and son, and in doing so had nearly drowned himself.
Paramedics told CBC they transported the 27-year-old man to hospital in stable condition.
“Three of us came in, but the dad stayed in the water until the firefighters found him,” Hickey said. “I think [Navarro] used all of his final energy to hand off his kid to the other guy, and he used all of his energy to keep them up until I was able to get out there and help them.”
Hickey and other bystanders waited with the boy until first responders arrived. The boy was transported to CHEO “as a precaution,” paramedics said Wednesday.
Hickey said the river is quite shallow in that area until a steep drop-off not far from shore.
“That’s where the current really gets messy, so you can walk right out and one step later you’re kind of just floating. And that’s where they got in trouble, I think,” he said.
On Thursday, passerby Kevin Power, who has lived nearby for 60 years, said the Ottawa River can be deceiving.
“Getting out into these currents with the rapids and such, it can really throw you for a loop and shock you and surprise you, and perhaps that’s what happened yesterday,” Power said.
Hickey said he remembered enough from his training to know it would have been dangerous to go back into the river to search for Navarro.
“I’m happy I was able to help and make the situation better, obviously. I don’t think there’s anything much anyone else could have done to help the dad really at that time, I think he was too far gone,” he said.
Hickey said he has since exchanged a few text messages with Amanda Laflair, Navarro’s wife and mother of eight-year-old William, the boy he helped save.
“We just want to say thank you to everybody that reached out to us and offered their help and their condolences. It really means a lot to us at this time,” Laflair told CBC in a telephone interview Thursday.
“And we especially want to thank the bystander that risked their life to save my son.”
