Linda Romero was a homicide detective in the Nashville Police Department. She loved to scuba dive and often took diving trips with her husband during the first five years of their marriage. Her husband developed a medical condition that prevented him from diving and after a few years, Linda started taking the occasional diving trip by herself. She would fly down to a location in the Caribbean and meet up with a diving group and dive for two or three days.
In April 2012, she met up with some divers in Curaçao. The trip was organized by a small company that had gotten good reviews from her other diving friends. She joined a group on Friday and Saturday that consisted mostly of alumni from the University of Wisconsin. Then on Sunday, the Wisconsin folks left, and she joined a larger group that came from various parts of the United States and Canada. Divers paired off with “buddies” who would stay within sight of each other during the dive as a safety precaution.
There was an odd number of divers, so Linda was paired off with Ned Harrison, an American from Chicago, who worked for the company that operated the dive. On the first dive of the day, everything went normally as she and Ned explored the site. But on the second dive, after the first few minutes or so, Ned started venturing further and further away from Linda. At first, she tried to stay with him, but she finally lost sight of Ned completely. Linda was wearing a dive watch and had a backup watch, so she wasn’t particularly worried about continuing to dive on her own. She was an experienced diver and she stayed in sight of the boat.
The group was to be back on board the boat at 11:00 a.m. so Linda headed up to the surface around ten minutes before 11:00. To her horror, the boat began to power away before she could surface. She didn’t understand how this could happen since every dive she had ever been on had “counted off” before leaving a dive site. All the other divers had apparently indicated that their buddies were accounted for, but Ned must have forgotten that he had a dive buddy of his own. Linda had read stories about divers on group tours being left behind, but the instances were so rare, that she never felt like it was a serious risk.
Ned’s primary job was to keep the group safe from the time they left the marina to the time they returned to it, and he had failed miserably.
Linda knew that the next dive site was about twenty minutes away by boat. She thought that Ned or one of the other group members would realize she was missing when they went into the water. She figured that within forty minutes or so, they would realize she was missing and return to retrieve her.
Forty minutes came and went and there was no sign of the dive boat returning. Linda was starting to consider her options and trying to suppress the urge to panic. If she decided to swim, she might develop a muscle spasm that could be fatal. But if she continued to wait, she could become too tired to swim if she later decided to do so.
Linda was forty-one and in good physical shape because she had to keep fit to qualify for her police job, but she had no experience in long-distance swimming and didn’t know the distance to shore.
The only land she could see was a barely visible lighthouse and ultimately, she decided to swim toward that. She dropped her weights and tank (but kept her floatation vest) and began what she would later find out was a four-mile swim to shore. It took her just over three and one-half hours to swim back to safety. She came aground at a small remote sandy beach. She was exhausted but otherwise uninjured. After resting for a while, she flagged down a couple of tourists who gave her water and a ride back to her hotel.
The next morning, she went into the dive shop to speak to the owner. As she started to tell the story of what had happened on Sunday, Ned walked into the office. At first, he didn’t seem to recognize Linda, but after a moment his face showed that he had just now realized that he had left Linda behind in the ocean. Linda finished recounting to the owner what had happened. The owner asked Ned if the story was accurate. Ned agreed that it was, and the owner fired Ned on the spot. Linda and the owner walked down to the boat, and she retrieved her small purse and personal belongings from a locker near the cabin. The fee that Linda paid for the trip was refunded and she was presented with a $5,000 gift card valid for future trips. As long as Ned didn't work there any longer, she was willing to give them another chance.
Linda continued to scuba dive, but she never went on another trip again without taking a friend with her.
