Woman Drowns After Helping Rescue Children

With temperatures in the mid-70s and mostly clear skies, the weekend offered the kind of days Pastor Lopez and his cousins loved for outings with their families on the west side of Santa Catalina Island.

“When the weather is nice, they go camping at Shark Harbor,” Lopez’s mother, Connie, said Sunday. “The weather was nice, but the water was very, very rough.”

Those rough waters turned the family outing to tragedy Saturday when one cousin, Linda Seals, 45, drowned in heavy surf after she and her relatives helped rescue several children, Pastor Lopez said.

Once all the children were safely onshore, Seals saw her husband, Randy, caught in a riptide, he said Sunday. And, though exhausted, she plunged back into the surf, unaware that her husband had been swept onto some rocks and had reached safety.

“I begged her not to go back,” Lopez said. “But that was the kind of person she was. She went to help someone else.”

Lopez, director of public works for Avalon, said he and his relatives knew how dangerous the waters at Shark Harbor could be--and the eight children in their group stayed onshore. But other youngsters--who came from the mainland and another part of the island--were unfamiliar with the area and took an inner tube into the deceptive surf, he said.

“It appeared safe to the kids to go in,” he said. “They were splashing in the shallows.”

Lopez, 46, said he was sitting away from the beach on a hill when he noticed that the children were caught in a riptide and were being swept toward the rocks.

“I started running down the hill,” he said. “Linda saw the same thing. By the time I got to the beach, all the kids were safe. But Linda was exhausted and had been caught in the riptide. She was being taken out.”

Lopez said he grabbed a paddleboard and paddled out to Seals. “She was having a hard time staying afloat,” he said. “I got her to hang on to the board and kept telling her, ‘We’re going to get out of this.’ ”

Eventually, with the help of his son, Pastor, 12, they got back to shallow water. But when Randy Seals jumped in to help, he was quickly swept toward the rocks, Lopez said.

Linda Seals, though exhausted, went back to find her husband, Lopez said.

“She had no thought of herself,” Lopez said. “That’s the way she always was--a very giving, wonderful person. She was an inspiration to a lot of people. She was as courageous as she was beautiful--inside and out.”

Another cousin, Leonard Lopez, went into the water to help and managed to reach her, but the ocean pounded him away, into the rocks. While he was pulled onto the beach, “we could see Linda’s body in the surf, but we couldn’t get to her,” Pastor Lopez said. “She was floating about 20 minutes before lifeguards got her out of the water.”

County firefighters took her by helicopter to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 3:50 p.m., Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said.