A Texas man who dived into a swirling section of the Roaring Fork River near Aspen to save his drowning wife helped her to shore but then fell victim to the river’s pull on Friday, according to authorities and witnesses.
Witnesses said a bystander ripped his shirt off and plunged into the river to rescue the man, Pankajkumar Swaminarayan, after he had disappeared below the surface. But, after pulling Swaminarayan to the surface, the bystander’s attempts at CPR could not revive him. The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office said Swaminarayan had been underwater for 10 to 15 minutes.
“I was exhausted, but I gave him mouth-to-mouth,” the bystander, Bo Weinglass, . “At that point, he wasn’t responding.”
The accident happened around 3:30 p.m. Friday at a spot known as , off of Colorado 82 southeast of Aspen. The Punchbowl is formed by the Roaring Fork River pouring into a natural rock bowl, creating a bubbling caldron .
According to the sheriff’s office, witnesses said Swaminarayan jumped into the Punchbowl to help his wife, after she fell in. Swaminarayan helped his wife to shore but was then sucked under by the river’s current. One witness told the Times that there is no cell service in that part of Independence Pass, so she ran to the road to flag down motorists and tell them to drive down far enough to call 911.
Weinglass was in one of the cars that stopped, and the witness said he immediately got out and began running toward the river, pulling his shirt off as he went.
“I was screaming, ‘Where’s the person? Where’s the person?’ but nobody really knew,” Weinglass told the Times. “Finally a kid pointed where he thought the body was. I jumped in with my eyes wide open, and I immediately saw the victim’s legs sticking up. He was definitely stuck, and the water was really moving through there.”
The sheriff’s office said Swaminarayan, 38, was from Stafford, Texas, a suburb of Houston.
