A Desperate Rescue Attempt at Sea

No sooner had Ron May heard radio chatter of a boating accident at an oil refinery buoy off El Segundo than he swung his own pleasure craft Mystic around hard and started scanning the horizon.

Barely a mile ahead, he spotted the running lights of the stricken boat, Charades, as it listed in the dark about 8:30 Monday night. Then, under a moonless sky, May and his friend Dick Tracy came upon four panic-stricken people screaming, “We’re sinking! We’re sinking!” Charades was taking on water rapidly through the nasty gash it suffered after striking an unlit steel buoy the size of a pickup truck.

May and Tracy coerced the four terrified survivors onto the Mystic and wrapped them in towels. But Charades was being swallowed by the ocean. And two more people were trapped in the unlucky craft, which was returning from what had been an Inglewood family’s happy outing to Catalina before turning tragic.

May, a retired Beverly Hills firefighter, donned a snorkel mask and flippers, grabbed a flashlight and dived into the 60-degree, oil-slickened waters, still fully dressed, in an attempt to save 8-year-old Donta Perry and his 66-year-old grandmother, Mildred Griffin.

In an interview Tuesday, May said he managed to grab Griffin in the boat’s bow. “I pulled and pulled and couldn’t get her out,” he said. “Then it started sinking so fast, I realized, ‘I can’t do this.’ ”

Minutes later, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol deputies Mark Ballin and Max Doke arrived on the scene about 1 1/4 miles offshore, parallel to Grand Avenue, south of Los Angeles International Airport. By then, only the tip of the 23-foot Charades’ cracked hull remained above water.

Ballin wasted no time. He tied Charades’ hull to his own vessel, donned scuba gear and plunged in. In what he later described as “the most hazardous rescue of my career,” Ballin found the boy and his grandmother wearing life jackets and pinned between open cabinets inside the flooded cabin.

Their life jackets complicated the rescue, he said, because it was difficult to pull them low enough to get them out away from the cabinets. It took all his strength to extricate them, he said.

Eventually, he freed the boy, then the woman. By then, however, they had been under the chilly water for about 10 minutes.

Once on the surface, sheriff’s deputies administered CPR to the victims, both of whom were in full cardiac arrest with lungs filled with water and suffering from hypothermia. They were rushed by boat to Marina del Rey and then to separate nearby hospitals.

Donta died a few hours later at UCLA Medical Center. Griffin, a subscription saleswoman for the Los Angeles Times, was in a coma Tuesday in the intensive care unit at Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital, where relatives and friends of the Inglewood family maintained a prayer vigil.

Among them was Charades skipper Donald Alves, 47, Griffin’s son, who recently purchased the boat in Las Vegas. Standing in an emergency room doorway and clad in a green surgical gown, Alves wept and said, “There’s only one question: Why weren’t those buoys lit? There weren’t any lights on them.

“All of a sudden, bang! we hit this thing,” recalled Alves, whose right eye was blackened in the incident. “I called mayday, and bang! We hit another one. My boat was going down fast.”

Replaying the incident over and over in his mind, Alves, who books entertainment in Las Vegas, remembered getting life jackets on his mother and Donta, his nephew, as the boat slipped into the water.

“My mom wasn’t moving fast enough. My mom was floating with the debris. I couldn’t get to her,” he recalled.

Lack of lights on the buoy, he said, “cost my nephew his life. I pray to God it doesn’t cost my mother her life too.”

Doug Gould, owner of Vessel Assist in Marina del Rey, a private company that offers pleasure boaters assistance during emergencies, praised May and Tracy: “It was really fortunate that they were there. They got the people out of the water and helped guide other rescue boats to the location. I think they saved four lives.”

But on Tuesday, the good Samaritans had some regrets.

“I woke up this morning thinking maybe we could have been more persuasive to get them off the boat faster,” Tracy said. May added: “I just did what I could. I just wish I would have tried harder.”

Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Gary Thornton, assistant harbor master and head of the dive team in Marina del Rey, suggested that the accident’s cause was “probably improper lookout.”

“I’m thinking it was dark out there, and he was probably unfamiliar with the area out there,” Thornton said. “The operator lives in Las Vegas. He probably didn’t realize these buoys are out there. They are on all the navigation charts and have been there for years and years.”

No charges are being filed at this time, although an investigation is underway, Thornton said.

Authorities said the buoy is among about a dozen white buoys used to mark oil tanker mooring areas.

An initial investigation by Capt. Peter Daniels, a maritime attorney and head of the Pacific Admiralty Bureau, which researches boating accidents, indicated that Charades plowed into the buoy while traveling at least 20 to 30 knots. Although Daniels said the buoy field meets minimum safety requirements, he conceded that a similar accident can happen again if the buoy and others in the area remain unlighted.

Figures from the state Department of Boating and Waterways show that the agency received 17 reports of boating accidents from Santa Monica Bay to Redondo Beach in 1998 and 1999.

Four people were injured and one person was killed in those mishaps. A spokesman for the agency said, however, that only a small percentage of boating accidents are reported to the department.

On Tuesday, a memorial of two candles flanking a vase of white flowers was placed on the front porch of Griffin’s green home in the 3000 block of West 108th Street in Inglewood.

Neighbor LaTasha Holden was among those moved to tears when she heard of the boy’s death. Trembling, Holden tried to decide the best way to break the news to her four daughters--all of whom were the boy’s playmates.

“This little boy used to torment my kids,” Holden said, fondly remembering the childhood pranks played by the deceased boy. “After all of that, my daughter and him got real close. He was here every day. I don’t know how she’s going to take it.”

Students and faculty at Oak Street Elementary School in Inglewood were shocked by third-grader Donta Perry’s death. Principal Marlene Felix, with a glazed look, remembered him as a boy who was “sweet, kind and smiled a lot. Probably would have been a leader in school.”

Veronica Deutsch, Donta’s teacher, said she was “actually shocked to see the students’ reactions” about the death. “I thought they’d be too young to understand, but as soon as they heard the news, many began to cry.”

To help them cope, Deutsch’s class wrote letters to Donta’s family.

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Staff writers Dalondo Moultrie, Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios, Louis Sahagun and Dan Weikel contributed to this story.