Murky Waters

On a cool autumn afternoon, four boys mysteriously drown in the Schuylkill. A terrible accident? Foul play? Eight months later, police and the neighborhood are still battling over facts, meaning and the truth.

Twenty minutes passed. Above, Lt. Domenic was seized with the feeling that something was about to happen. "Get them out of here," he ordered one of his sergeants, nodding at the families gathered behind the yellow police tape. The sergeant rounded up some police vans and had the families taken to the courtroom of the 18th precinct at 55th and Pine, where they waited. The precinct’s ride-along clergyman was summoned.

At 11:20, Gallus reached out and grabbed something solid in he murk: a leg. There were two bodies there, only 36 feet from shore, both in a fetal position with their limbs intertwined. Kenny and Jamie. "I have two," Gallus said into his headset. In he darkness he maneuvered the bodies, as light as cloth puppets n the underwater environment, until each of his arms was scooped under their armpits. Then, clasping his hands together around the tether, he told Gelovich to bring him up. As they ascended, Gallus tried to keep himself and the boys upright by bracing his feet against the wall, but his boots kept slipping off its surface into the abyss. This is what did it, he thought. They slipped right down the wall. He may or may not have been right: the medical examiner’s office declines to comment on whether there was oil or silt residue under the boys’ fingernails.

And then Gallus hit the underside of the lip. "What’s going on?" Gelovich asked. Gallus announced he was stuck. He tried to squirm his way out from under the concavity while making sure neither of the boys slid from his grip. After a few minutes he got an idea: He placed his feet against the underside of the rock and ordered Gelovich to give him several feet of slack. When he felt the rope loosen, he kicked out and away while ordering Gelovich to reel him in. He and the boys went over and around the hump of the rock and broke the skin of the water. Even at the surface Gallus continued to work by feel, refusing to look as he secured a knot around the two bodies. "Down again," he told Gelovich. Up on deck, the boys bodies became animate for a moment, shivering as the pressurized fluids within them escaped from their mouths.

At 11: 35 Gallus found another boy, face down with his jacket on, ten feet farther out from the first two. Sean. The cautious one. The one who most feared water-even from the orange fireplug on South 53rd Street. At the motels he and his mother stayed at when visiting his cousins in South Carolina, Sean would only brave the baby pool "Mama," he’d say, laughing at himself. "I just goin’ where the babies are. Up to they ankles!"    

It was now clear that the boys had more or less fallen straight down. Kenny and Jamie were on top of each other, and the others were there was no lateral current, and they did not travel. Yet the medical examiner later concluded that the bruises and nicks on the boys’ faces were normal for drowning victims, that bodies routinely get beaten up as the current bumps them along the bottom. "Sometimes," says Jeff Moran, a spokesman :or the medical examiner’s office, "bruising occurs even when :he current doesn’t carry the body away."
At half past 12 Gallus ran out of air. A decision was made to refill the air tanks and complete the dive. No one wanted to tell the families that one boy was still missing-nobody knew who, since the boys carried no wallets or ID-but that it was too late to continue searching. Just before 2 on Wednesday morning, some 26 hours after the boys were originally reported missing, Mike Gelovich, who had taken over for Gallus, discovered Dontel 25 feet from where Kenny and Jamie had come to rest. The first time Gelovich ever recovered the body of a child, he cried into his mask. Now, he calls what he does the "recovery of objects from the water."