ST. AUGUSTINE BEACH, Fla. — A woman who nearly drowned at St. Augustine Beach Saturday is still recovering from her injuries after getting caught in a rip current. There were several people instrumental in saving her, but at least one is still anonymous.
“We were certain that she was gone,” Laura Iwanski said of her friend – only identified so far as Kelly. The two women and their husbands had brought their kids to the beach for a day of fun. Kelly was in the water with her 14-year-old son Ty and 12-year-old Gia Iwanski, when the current began pulling them out toward the sea.
“I would say, like, three minutes, but it felt like 10 years,” Gia Iwanski recalled. “I wanted to be able to tell everybody I love them because I thought that was it for me.”
At first, Laura Iwanski and her husband, Jeff, weren’t aware that an emergency was building rapidly. Jeff Iwanski was with Kelly’s husband Mark on the beach, and Laura had taken her toddler Adeleine to the water.
“We got Gia out of the water, thinking she’d just been tossed around,” Laura Iwanksi told First Coast News. She would later understand that “Gia and Ty and Kelly were struggling in the current for a couple of minutes before things turned really south.”
She also would learn from Kelly – much later – that Kelly had been at the brink of surrendering to exhaustion.
“She said something that I know Jeff and I will never forget, that the last thing she remembered was telling Ty to take Gia and save Gia," she said. "And then she said that she was totally okay and at peace with basically whatever happened next, just as long as the kids were alright.”
While Ty heeded that desperate plea to prioritize saving his fellow teen, his mother would actually disappear beneath the waves.
“Ty reached, like, put his hand out, so I grabbed it,” Gia Iwanski said.
Chaos ensued as the youngsters struggled their way back to the beach, and although no one seemed to recall their precise moments of awareness, they eventually realized that someone was saving Kelly.
“I turned around and saw somebody carrying [Kelly] out,” Jeff Iwanski remembered. “When I saw him coming in he looked exhausted.”
In a flurry, two nurses who were part of a nearby party became aware of what was happening.
“I noticed a woman being carried out of the water,” Kelsey Genners told First Coast News, describing the woman as limp.
“Her mouth was blue, there was foam.”
Genners and Leanna Swilley, who had never met before Saturday, were common friends of a couple who had planned their wedding for that day but were delayed by the coronavirus crisis. The couple had invited a number of their friends to join them at the beach instead.
“Just looking at the color on [the unconscious woman’s] face, we both went into ‘nurse’ mode,” Swilley said.
That meant administering C.P.R. until medics arrived, about five minutes later. Genners said she wasn’t sure, even after the woman was taken away by ambulance that she would survive.
“I was really hopeful that she was. She wasn’t waking up.”
Laura Iwanski was devastated as her friend was driven away.
“I was certain that I had just watched my friend die.”
But Kelly survived, and in hindsight Genners’ and Swilley’s actions made an enormous difference.
“The doctors said that it was 100% the quality of the C.P.R. that was done in those first few minutes that kept her from experiencing brain damage and just death in general,” Laura Iwanski said.
“That’s amazing to hear and that makes my heart really feel great,” Genners smiled.
“That was the first time I’d ever met [Swilley], and afterward, when we left, we were like ‘We’re bonded now!’”
But they wouldn’t learn until Monday that the woman they helped had survived, and even then it was because of intense efforts by those close to Kelly, using social media to find the people who first saved her. And, as of Tuesday, no one seemed to know who the man was who made it all possible by carrying Kelly from the water.
“He gave [Kelly’s sons] their Mom back,” Laura Iwanski affirmed. “He truly was the catalyst for what was a group of complete strangers coming together to make the scariest day of our lives one of the happiest.”
Iwanski described the man as average height and heavy-set with thinning hair and a hairy chest. He was wearing blue swim trunks.
“We want nothing more than to be able to just thank him for being there.”
Although unavailable for an interview Tuesday, Kelly sent a statement to First Coast News:
“I just want to thank those girls (the nurses) from the bottom of my heart for reacting so quickly and never giving up on performing C.P.R. I was told by every team member of the E.R. and I.C.U. at Flagler Hospital that they saved my life along with the gentleman that pulled me from the water and my 14-year-old son who never gave up.
The first responders and the entire team at Flagler Hospital are absolutely amazing and are responsible for my full recovery.”