Police: Lifeguards found drowned man by accident at Wild Waves
Aug 23, 2016, 6:37 AM
A police report says lifeguards found a man’s body at the bottom of an amusement park pool by accident.
KIRO 7 received the investigation on Monday, just a couple of days after 32-year-old Vijayarengan Srinivasan drowned at Wild Waves.
According to the police report, the last person to see the 32-year-old was a friend at the park on Saturday. The friend was going to jump off a “big rock platform” to get into the 10-foot-deep activity pool. Srinivasan said he “might go down the nearby water slides” because he was a weak swimmer.
The two men made plans to meet at the water’s edge.
When the friend got out of the water, he did not see Srinivasan “anywhere near the activity pool.” So he went to check “the roller coaster area.”
Around 5 p.m., a lifeguard thought she saw “a body on the bottom of the pool.” She and a supervisor both searched but were “unable to locate anything.”
Minutes later, a 12-year-old began approaching lifeguards positive she and her friend saw a body in the pool.
“I told him and he said, ‘We already checked, and it’s just the paint,’” the girl told KIRO 7. “I said: ‘No I saw his legs and hair,’ and [the lifeguard] said: ‘I’ll go check in 10 or 20 minutes.’”
Frustrated, the girl tried one more time to get the attention of a female lifeguard.
“I just yelled at her, ‘There’s seriously something down there you need to go check,’ and she did not say anything, she just gave me a thumbs up.”
At 5:20 p.m., 20 minutes after the first lifeguard thought she saw something, and just a few minutes after the children did see something, a third lifeguard was helping a guest retrieve “prescription glasses.” According to the report, he “discovered an Indian male laying face up on the bottom of the pool.”
Wild Waves would not answer any questions about what its lifeguards did and did not do, only releasing a statement that reads in part: “We are actively reviewing the facts as they become available including all of our safety protocols, reports from officials and the actions taken by our staff.”
Srinivasan’s friend said the programmer just moved to Bellevue to work at INFOSYS, and leaves behind a wife and 3-year-old child.
His death comes as at least four other major amusement park accidents have been reported across the U.S.
Federal Way police will not be launching a criminal investigation, but the King County Department of Health is working with the state to examine Wild Waves’ lifeguard plan.
