A Child Goes Missing Underwater: Update

It was during an Open Water Diver class in a Texas lake last August. Did the instructor take too many students into the water at one time? Was the arm's-length visibility too little for training? Why was 12-year-old Dylan Harrison, a young girl, buddied with a 12-year-old boy instead of with a suitably qualified adult? Why was there a delay before starting the search? Why were dive computers not collected and downloaded immediately after the incident? Why did the accompanying divemaster later lose his computer on a dive in another lake? Why did the Kaufman County Sheriff's office attempt to close the case with inordinate haste? Complacency, conspiracy, or plain stupidity?

Dylan's instructor, William Armstrong, was recently appointed as an assistant chief deputy sheriff for Collins County in McKinney, Texas. The day before Dylan died, Armstrong had worked a full day as an assistant chief deputy sheriff, and then worked an off-duty overnight security job from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. That morning, he made a one-hour drive to The Scuba Ranch to teach his 8 a.m. open-water certification class. If he had any sleep in the previous 24 hours, it couldn't have been more than a catnap.

After his student disappeared, Armstrong was reported as saying, "I've done nothing wrong," but a young life was unnecessarily lost.

Two weeks ago, we sent Undercurrent members our write-up on the tragic loss of 12-year-old Dylan Harrison. If you didn't read our Undercurrent report, you may read it here. It didn't have to end like that.

Undercurrent's Senior Editor John Bantin reflects on his youngest daughter learning to dive, the choice of benign conditions, the selection of trusted instructors, and his own monitoring, first written for Diver Magazine (UK) 14 years ago, and reproduced as an Insider Blog here.