A boat capsized on Oxbow Lake in White Lake Township Tuesday afternoon, killing the driver and seriously injuring a passenger who was rescued by fellow boaters.
The Oakland County Sheriff's Office says the incident happened just after 2 p.m. Dive teams arrived on scene quickly and remained on scene late into the night, before recovering a body just before 9 p.m.
Sam Dubin and his mother were out on their pontoon when they witnessed their neighbor go airborne in his speedboat with a passenger on board.
"We were the only other boat on the lake at the time and our neighbor, he has this hydroplane that he would regularly take out on weekdays like this when the lake was not busy," Dubin said.
Dubin described the boat as a two-seat hydroplane-style speedboat. The neighbor was often seen driving the boat at very fast speeds and was well known by his neighbors.
Hear from residents in the area in the video player below
"We weren't good friends with him but he was a good guy,” Dubin said. "He was a known entity on the lake, people knew him to do that, this was something that people watched on the lake."
"Right away, the boat flipped. The driver, he was ejected and then the passenger, we could see he was in the water, so right away we called 911. We were pretty close, we were able to get there in 20 seconds," Dubin said.
Dubin pulled the surviving passenger to safety using a life vest tied to a docking rope.
"Very quickly I tied a life vest onto our docking rope, threw that to the survivor, got him around to our ladder, he got on and kept him as calm as possible," Dubin said.
With the speedboat quickly sinking and the driver nowhere to be found, search boats from multiple counties responded and spent hours on the water.
Lt. Brian Burwell of the Oakland County Sheriff's Office described the challenging conditions facing divers.
"The area we're searching is between 30-50 feet of water, divers are in zero visibility, so they're pretty much diving off of feel," Burwell said.
Drones helped scan the surface while divers and sonar equipment scanned the lake bottom. Lt. Burwell says they located the boat before finding the victim.
"We're using an underwater robot to scan certain areas of the lake, we're also using boats with side scan sonars and we are running sonar searches with the boats, and we also have a hand held scanner the divers use in addition to a 360 sonar to give us some different views of what's on the bottom of the lake," Burwell said.
Neighbor Richard Schwallie described the mood among those watching the search unfold.
"Oh it's extremely sad, everyone knew him, he was a great guy, everyone enjoyed his company," Schwallie said.
Despite the tragedy, Dubin expressed gratitude that the passenger survived.
"We knew of the gravity and I think our response, thank God, his life was saved today," Dubin said.
The rescued passenger was taken to the hospital with serious injuries.
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