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Jul 5, 2008 11:23 am US/Central
19-Year-Old Brainerd Man Drowns In Gull Lake
(WCCO)
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About an hour after the search began, the body of 19-year-old Nathan S. Awalt of Brainerd, Minn. was recovered just off of Gull Point.
CBS
The Independence Day weekend took a tragic turn when a 20-year-old man drowned in Gull Lake on Friday.
The Cass County Sheriff's Department received a 911 call about 1:30 p.m. reporting that a man had gone underwater on Gull Lake and had not resurfaced.
Brett Skaugstad said she was enjoying a beautiful Fourth of July afternoon when things suddenly turned chaotic.
"We realized something was wrong. We saw a guy running, had said that there had been, that he believed that there had been an accident," she recalled.
Cass County patrol cars and ambulances pulled up in front of her family's cabin, and that is when she saw paramedics trying to revive a young man near her dock. Nineteen-year-old Nathan S. Awalt of Brainerd, Minn. was pronounced dead at the scene.
Witnesses said he had been swimming with a group of friends near Gull Point when he went under water and never came back up. Gull Point is a sandy part of Gull Lake that is popular among boaters and swimmers.
"It's actually, you know, it's almost annoying-busy, 'cause there's so many boats. This year it seems like it's a lot busier than other years," said boater J.T. Ebert.
Sergeant Erick Hoglund of the Cass County Sheriff's Department said that the area where Awalt was swimming is considered a dangerous part of Gull Lake.
"It goes out, and probably, maybe 10 feet out it starts and there's a shelf that drops down at approximately 60 feet. So it's a sharp drop, and it could pose a danger for anybody swimming if they're not a good swimmer," he said.
Hoglund wouldn't say whether alchohol was a factor, and added that Awalt hadn't been wearing a life jacket. Hoglund estimated that the man had been underwater for about an hour.
After the drowning, authorities moved people off of Gull Point.
"It was obviously a traumatic situation. I know family members had arrived, had gotten phone calls. It was a lot of -- it was frankly chaos with kids coming off the point. It was a lot of action for this area," said Skaugstad.
Awalt's family told authorities that he did not have a medical condition.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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