Kalaiokealaula Ashley Nicole Reyes Kanekoa, Hawaii mom of two falls off cliff & drowns as boyfriend, Dylan Gapp blames emergency respondents for not rescuing the woman in treacherous conditions.
Could one woman’s death have been averted? A 29-year-old Hawaii mother of two drowned after slipping and falling from the top of a cliff as her helpless boyfriend looked on, endlessly waiting for emergency personnel, before eventually being swept out to sea.
Kalaiokealaula Ashley Nicole Reyes Kanekoa was with her boyfriend, Dylan Gapp, 31, watching the waves on a cliff near Hawaiian Paradise Park around 2am Sunday when she slipped and fell into current waters off Puna Coast.
Her frantic boyfriend said he had to listen to her ‘suffer and scream for help,’ during the wait for emergency personnel to arrive that he claimed took hours, Hawaii News Now reported.
A boyfriend tries to save his girlfriend after falling into raging waters in the dead of night
He said when police and firefighters finally did arrive, they were not equipped with the life saving equipment they needed to rescue his girlfriend.
During the ordeal, he attempted to toss a flotation device to her, but tragically the young woman was pulled out by the ocean’s currents.
Gapp said his girlfriend survived the plunge but did not survive the long wait for help, and claimed emergency personnel should have done more to save her.
‘I had to get a raft to her. They didn’t have a flotation device. I got the raft out to her, and I said, OK, let’s get a rope to her so she doesn’t drift away, and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t have any rope,’ Gapp told Hawaii News Now.
‘To sit there and watch this girl suffer for 45 minutes to an hour suffer and scream for help and them to say boats were coming eventually.’
What could emergency personnel have done better?
Hawaii County police and firefighters responded, within seven minutes of the 911 call.
Officials said that the fire truck was not required to carry ocean equipment, and with dangerous conditions from a large north swell, it was too dark and hazardous for first responders to enter into the waters.
Hawaii County Police Captain Todd Pataray told the news outlet they ‘requested services from the fire department for a rescue boat, attempted to call a fire department helicopter and called the Coast Guard.’
Gapp said he tried to save his girlfriend on his own and swam out to where she was clinging to a raft, after an hour of waiting for the helicopter and rescue boat to surface, but by the time he returned, he said emergency responders could no longer see her.
Recalled the boyfriend, ‘Her sitting on that raft screaming help. ‘What do I do now? What do I do now?’ And me telling her they are going to get you, and they are going to get you. And they never came to get her.’
Social media responds
The Hawaii Fire Department told Hawaii News Now that the conditions were too windy to fly the helicopter, and said the rescue boat had to come from Hilo about 15 miles up the coast and arrived at 4am.
According to police, the fire department and Coast Guard searched for the missing woman through the early morning hours, and by 8 am, nearly six hours after the tragic fall, the young woman’s body was found approximately four miles down the shore near Honolulu Landing in Pāhoa.
She was transported to the Hilo Medical Center where she was pronounced deceased at 10.58am, according to a police statement.
An autopsy determined that her manner and cause of death was accidental drowning. Police said there was no foul play suspected, People reported.
Gapp called his girlfriend, ‘a loving, caring person.’
‘She loved her kids more than anything. She had a lot of fun. Lot of joy in life. She was always giggling, laughing,’ he said.
A GoFundMe was created to help raise money for Keankekoa’s funeral. As of Friday afternoon more than $3,910 has been raised towards their goal of $8,000.
An investigation is ongoing as authorities await toxicology reports.
And then there were these comments on the web (below) that caught this author’s attention. See what you think?
They were where they shouldn’t have been, and they expected the first responders to put themselves in the same jeopardy.
This whole entire thing could have been AVOIDED by having common sense safety practices, like not sitting on a cliff at two in the morning. Why do people endanger themselves like this?
You cannot expect a rescue boat or helicopter in darkness, alongside a cliff in choppy seas and at 0200 in the morning. It was a recovery mission right from the start.
