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'There are amazing human beings out there': First Coast women praise man who saved them from perilous Caribbean waters

Kim Hunt and Leslie Kincart were visiting Puerto Rico when a crashing wave knocked them off a seaside rock. What happened next, they say, was a miracle.
Credit: First Coast News
Man saves two women while they are visiting Puerto Rico

ISABELA, Puerto Rico — It happened in a split second. Kimberly Hunt's vacation to Puerto Rico turned into a fight for her life. It was a Saturday morning. She was 1,200 miles from her home in St. Johns County and didn't realize Tropical Storm Jerry was bearing down on the Caribbean Island.

Hunt, 45, had left Jacksonville and flown to the west coast of Puerto Rico with her friend Leslie Kincart, 58. They were visiting Andy Carlton, who had recently moved there from St. Augustine. They decided to walk down to Montones Beach near Aguadilla to see the spectacular waves crash against the rocks.

“No one goes in the water in this part of the beach," Carlton said. "You can’t survive. All the locals know you don’t swim here."

They had no plans to get in the water, but when the women walked out to a rock everything changed.

"The rock was not slippery," Hunt recalled. "There was no water coming on it and we turned around for one second and, the next thing you know, a wave came up as high as our knees and the suction was so hard going back in from the wave it pulled us right in."

Credit: Leslie Kincart
Kim Hunt, Andy Carlton and Leslie Kincart in Puerto Rico

She and Kincart were swallowed by the Atlantic, while Carlton, who did not have a cell phone with him and can’t swim, watched helplessly, trying not to lose sight of them. With no one else nearby, they were stranded about 100 feet from shore, and time was not on their side.

"I was looking for my friend," Hunt said. "She was a good 30 to 40 feet away from me. All of a sudden we were in an area where the waves started to crash on us, and when the waves crashed, I would go underneath the water and flip, violently flip, over and over again.” 

Kincart, a mother of five, didn’t know if she would ever see her children again.

“I remember being pulled under 10 to 15 times and the only three thoughts I had -- and I remember this vividly -- I can probably only handle one more wave and thinking, ‘Wow, this is the way it’s going to go down. This is it,’” she said.

As the women looked toward the shore for help, they saw no one. Hunt knew she needed to get out of the rip current she was trapped in, but, as hard as she tried, she couldn't swim out of it.

Credit: Kim Hunt
Montones Beach, Puerto Rico

"I remember thinking ‘Are you kidding me? This is how I'm going to die?’" Hunt said. "I don't want to cry, but I have two kids. They're grown, but they need their mama, and I remember thinking about them and thinking 'It's not going to happen like this.'"

Hunt's medical training kicked in. The nurse practitioner knew she had to stay calm.

"I will say I did pray," she said. "I kept saying, 'God please, please, please tell me what can I do to help myself that I'm not thinking of.' I was thinking about the adrenaline, knowing I had to rest, like float on your back. I know I went under at least 20 times, but I probably floated 10 times on my back knowing I had to save my energy."

Screaming at the top of her lungs for help, she watched as a stranger, Ricardo Morales Velez, 37, who she now calls her angel, came running down the steps of a boardwalk and dove right into the water.

Credit: First Coast News
Women are rescued in Puerto Rico by man.
Credit: Ricardo Morales Velez
Photo of Ricardo Morales Velez

He had heard a woman say there was someone who needed help in the water.

"I looked at the waves and they were four to six feet tall," he said. "There was a big swell and when the woman told me there were two people in the water, I said 'That's not possible.' I just reacted because I had the skills to save them.”

Carlton said it was “selfless."

"You talk about heroic," he said. "Wow! Just to go into that surf. This man was amazing. What a physique this guy had. He didn’t hesitate. This was a man.”

Velez pulled Kincart, who wasn't as far out, to the shore, while Hunt struggled to keep her head above water.

"I knew he was going to come get me," Hunt said. "It took him a little bit of time. He was so methodical.”

She said he returned to the dangerous water, without hesitating, for a second rescue -- hers.

“That is what shocks me, that he came right back in that water with a plan, because he went out to the left of me to swim with the current and pass the waves and he came right to me and said very calmly 'You're going to be fine. Hold on to me,'" Hunt recalled.

Velez said the waves were strong.

"I just went into the water and asked God to give me the strength to save her," he said. "I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about her. My father and mother taught me to be like that, always help first."

Velez waited for a break in the waves and then started swimming back with Hunt.

When they finally made it to shore, a crowd had gathered. Hunt remembers hearing the women there praying and thanking God, and seeing them holding rosary beads. She tried to stand up but couldn't.

"I think my adrenaline was gone," she said. "I know my oxygen was about out because many people told me my lips were blue and my skin looked white. They kept talking in Spanish and, finally, my friend said, ‘Kim, they think they broke your ribs’ because they pulled me so hard, pulling me out of the water, and I just couldn't open my eyes."

Hunt was loaded onto a board and eventually put on a stretcher in an ambulance and taken to the hospital. The man who saved her remained right there by her side.

"He absolutely saved two women's lives who absolutely would have never made it out of there," Hunt said. "I knew there was no way I was swimming in. He gives it all to God's glory. He kept saying that God gave him the strength to make it out there twice. He said, 'I work out five days a week. I'm a triathlete. I'm a surfer.’"

Hunt believes God placed Velez there at that specific time to rescue her and her friend. Velez does too. He had been in the habit of running at that beach every other Saturday with a friend, but they were typically there an hour earlier. That day, his friend got delayed, putting Velez there at the exact moment Hunt and Kincart needed to be rescued.

“Out of 10,000 men, there was probably only one who had the stamina and had the character to go in twice and he happened to be there at that moment," Kincart said. "I credit that to God. We've been given another chance."

A few days later, the two women returned to the First Coast with only scrapes and bruises, grateful to be alive. They felt compelled to share their story to let everyone know there is good in the world.

"I believe people need to have faith that good things happen in this world," Hunt said.

Kincart has a similar message.

“This man absolutely risked his life twice to get us in, and he wanted nothing,” she said. “The most powerful thing for me in all of this is there are amazing human beings out there and you don’t hear a lot about that, but this guy, a humble, humble man said it was only God’s glory.”

Carlton said the only reason his two friends are alive today is "because of that man."

“It was a miracle,” he said.

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