[Serious] Redditors who saw someone die: What happened?

Saw an older guy drown once. I was in the British Virgin Islands and there is this spot near the beach with these beautiful giant boulders called the Baths. The water splashes through there and forms these pools, surrounded by these massive boulders. Some of the pools even feel like they are underground because of the sheer size.

The BVI are a big sailing destination - many of the people on vacation there are on a boat charter. So if yore visiting the Baths, the most direct way to get there is to anchor offshore, and swim about 100 yards through some pretty deep water. Which is what we did, with out 5 year old daughter. (We were wearing life vests).

No sooner did we make it to the beach than we heard some woman screaming about 100ft offshore and we saw a couple guys jump into the water and swim out from the beach. They drag ashore an older man, maybe in his 70's, a bit overweight, obviously not breathing. They start pounding on him and call over someone better trained at CPR and attempt that for a good 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, the beach is scattering and people retreat to the treeline and look on while shit is going down. This entire time his wife is frantically losing it next to all the commotion, as you would expect.

In the interim, we walked away to a part of the park where you couldn't see the beach so our daughter wouldn't have to watch. We were gone about 30 minutes, but by the time we decided it was time to go, the man is still on the beach, still dead, and some kind of authorities are showing up with a sheet and stretcher. The Coast Guard is trying to bring a boat ashore but it's really hard with the surf and the breaking waves. It takes them at least 5 or 6 attempts to bring their boat up to the beach. Then once they do, it takes like 4 of them to drag him onto the stretcher, cover him up, then hoist him up on the boat. They then take his body and his distraught wife away, and that was that. Guy was there on vacation, doing a fun thing, and next thing you know he's dead and his widow has to figure out how to end her vacation and go home with her dead husband.

We were so freaked out that instead of swimming back to our boat, my wife and daughter walked about 30 min up the road and I swam back to our boat to retrieve our dinghy, and picked them up on a calmer beach.

/r/AskReddit Thread