By Andrew Marra
Palm Beach Post
PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — Palm Beach County Fire Rescue officials are still investigating why a medic who dove into a canal to search an overturned car for survivors never found the man inside — even though he was still in the driver’s seat with his seat belt on.
The incident came in a high-profile February crash involving millionaire polo mogul John Goodman, who is charged with drunkenly ramming the car of a recent college graduate into a canal near Wellington, then leaving the scene without calling for help or trying to rescue the drowning victim.
The crash at Lake Worth Road and 120th Avenue South was reported at 1 a.m. by a passerby but probably occurred at least several minutes before. Fire rescue workers and Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies responded about 1:12 a.m.
They found the wreckage of Goodman’s Bentley, and in the canal nearby they saw the protruding wheels of an overturned Hyundai Sonata that had been driven by 23-year-old Scott Wilson.
Newly released reports show that a fire rescue captain entered the waist-high canal water around the car and reportedly reached his hand and leg through the car’s driver side door, which he said was slightly open.
He found nothing inside. He moved to the passenger side of the car, where he also reported he felt nothing.
Sheriff’s deputies called for a tow truck to remove Wilson’s car from the canal. It wasn’t until the car was pulled out that investigators realized Wilson was inside.
“As the vehicle was coming up out of the water we immediately observed the white male seated in the driver seat and seatbelted in,” a deputy wrote in a report.
Wilson was dead, his lungs full of silt. The county medical examiner ruled the cause of death as drowning.
Palm Beach County Fire Rescue has two dive teams but it is difficult to dispatch them quickly, so initial inspections of submerged cars are usually done by medics on the scene, agency spokesman Capt. Don DeLucia said Tuesday.
“You rely on someone from the arriving crew initially,” he said. He said rescue trucks are equipped with masks and snorkels, and medics are trained to conduct simple dive searches.
DeLucia said he was unfamiliar with the details of the crash but pointed out that it is extremely difficult to see in canal water even in daylight.
The agency launched an investigation into the incident but four months later has not yet concluded its probe, DeLucia said.
The sheriff’s office also reviewed its deputies’ actions after the crash and determined they responded appropriately, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.
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