Secret Service Supervisor Drowns in Boating Mishap

A veteran U.S. Secret Service supervisor apparently drowned off the coast of Long Beach after he and a second agent were thrown out of their small motorboat during a nighttime pleasure trip near the Queen Mary, authorities said Sunday.

Rescue boats, helicopters and divers spent much of Saturday night and Sunday combing the waters near Long Beach’s downtown marina, but officials believed him to be dead, said Battalion Chief Jack Bender of the Long Beach Fire Department.

The victim was not immediately identified until relatives could be notified.

He and another agent, 47-year-old John C. Hughes, left the Alamitos Bay marina in Long Beach about 8 p.m. Saturday night in Hughes’ Boston Whaler, a 13-foot boat with an outboard motor, and headed up the coast, staying within a few miles of shore, Bender said.

They made it to the harbor area off downtown Long Beach, but it is unclear what happened next.

“It’s all speculation now on what caused them to be thrown over,” Bender said. While the water inside the Long Beach harbor--surrounded by breakwaters--are generally calm, a swell may have hit the small boat, or perhaps a sudden maneuver knocked the two men overboard, he said.

Hughes and the second agent--described as a poor swimmer--clung to each other in the chilly water for 20 minutes to half an hour, Bender said.

Hughes “recalls that they separated and [the other agent] just started swimming frantically to shore” toward the lights emanating from the Queen Mary and the dome that once housed the Spruce Goose plane, and, Bender said, “that’s the last he saw of his friend.”

Authorities received a report about 9:30 p.m. of an abandoned vessel seen moving in circles near a coastal oil island about a mile offshore. About an hour after that, people aboard a 35-foot sailboat spotted Hughes swimming toward shore and rescued him, authorities said.

Hughes was taken to St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, treated for hypothermia and released several hours later.

“Physically he will recover. There’s nothing lasting about his injuries,” said James Bauer, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Los Angeles office. “But obviously emotionally he’s somewhat traumatized by this.”

Bauer described Hughes and the victim as career agents with more than 20 years each in the Secret Service, each assigned to head up criminal investigative squads in the Los Angeles office.

An aerial search for the victim is expected to continue today.

Four-person teams of divers wrapped up their underwater efforts midafternoon Sunday after scouring the waters for much of the day without success. “We’re really looking for a needle in a haystack, and we’re not sure what haystack to look at. We hate to [end the underwater search], but the teams are just getting really tired,” Bender said.