‘You grab me and we’re both gonna drown.’ GA deputy describes late night river rescue
It was past 10 o’clock Sunday night when Monroe County sheriff’s Sgt. Chris Sherrell stood on a highway bridge where the Ocmulgee River, in the murky darkness below, was sweeping a struggling swimmer downstream.
The boat landing there beneath Georgia Highway 83 at the Monroe-Jasper county line is a gathering place for rivergoers and revelers — sometimes well into the night, when venturing into the water may not be the wisest endeavor.
It was not immediately clear what, other than the 85-degree nighttime swelter, led the man to take a dip there at the landing 4 miles upriver from Juliette.
When Sherrell peered down at the water, he could see people on shore who’d been with the swimmer.
“They were all just hanging out,” the deputy said.
Now they were pointing flashlights into the blackness, hoping to spot the man.
Then Sherrell trained his own flashlight on the floating-away swimmer, who was shirtless in swim trunks and a ball cap.
It appeared the man, later identified as 29-year-old Taylor Romport of Forsyth, had ventured into the middle of the river and, because of the swift water, been unable to swim ashore.
“He was splashing around and screaming,” Sherrell told The Telegraph by phone on Monday. “He was stuck in the current.”
Sherrell rushed down to the east side of the river, the Jasper County side.
In the woods along the overgrown riverbank, more trouble lurked. A water moccasin bit Sherrell’s boot.
“Luckily ... not my leg,” he said.
Meanwhile, two other deputies, Justyn Weaver and Tom Morgan, tromped along the west bank. Flashlights beaming, they followed Romport downstream. He was by then maybe 100 yards south of the bridge and the boat ramp where he’d gone in.
Soon Romport sank beneath the surface. He bobbed up.
“I took my boots off, took my shirt off, took my (bulletproof) vest off and,” Sherrell said, “pretty much jumped in the river” in his patrol pants, socks and a T-shirt.
Deputies Weaver and Morgan dove in too.
They swam toward Romport.
Sherrell reached him first.
“I got behind him,” the deputy said. “I held him up a little bit. He breathed for a minute, got some good air, and the current kind of pushed us off the (underwater) rock I was standing on.”
Even as they struggled in the current, now perhaps 500 yards beyond the highway bridge where the drama began, Sherrell said Romport was coherent enough: “I said, ‘Look, man, don’t grab me. You grab me and we’re both gonna drown.’ The only thing (Romport) told me was, ‘Let me hold your hand.’”
“Just breathe,” the deputy said to Romport as the deputy grabbed hold of his hand. “All you’ve got to do is breathe.”
Sherrell then guided Romport to a tree branch and Romport held on.
But Sherrell couldn’t. He kept floating south.
“It’s pitch-black,” the deputy recalled.
By chance, his back bumped an underwater tree limb.
“Call it divine intervention or whatever,” Sherrell said, who clung to the limb until a rescue boat and the other deputies arrived a few minutes later to help him and Romport aboard.
Sherrell said deputies Weaver and Morgan deserve the credit: “They are the heroes.”