An aspiring medical student was left brain-dead last month when his friends pushed him into a Louisiana lake knowing he couldn’t swim, and then looked on while doing nothing to save the drowning man.
Shocking video shows the group casually staring into the water moments after they shoved Christopher Gilbert off the dock at Lake D’Arbonne in Farmerville on April 14.
At least one woman can be seen slowly entering the water before abandoning the rescue mission.
10 minutes passed before a patron at a nearby restaurant intervened and yanked Gilbert back to land.
The 26-year-old was brain dead and the rest of his organs were starting to fail by the time he arrived at a local hospital, his mother Yolanda George told KSLA.
He spent 72 hours on a ventilator and an ECMO machine, which George described as “dialysis for the lungs.”
“I was devastated. I felt like my life had ended at that moment. My son is aspiring to be a medical doctor, my son is going to be a medical doctor. He got his masters last year in biological science. He’s preparing for medical school so for this to have happened to him … I was just devastated,” George said.
According to police, his so-called friends initially tried to pass off the near-death as “horse-play.”
They even told the lie to his mother in the moments after he was rescued.
“A friend of his called and she was hysterical crying. She told me that Chris has fell into the lake and he had been underwater for 10 minutes or so,” the mother said.