One Spanish Lookout family brought in the new year looking for the body of their loved one at the bottom of a 20 foot deep lake.
29 year old Eddie Dueck, a born Belizean who now resides in Canada was home for the holidays visiting with family and friends. On New Year's Eve, he was attending a picnic at the countryside park in Spanish Lookout.
Dueck, who wasn't wearing a life-jacket and couldn't swim, hopped on a jet ski on the lagoon around 2:30 that afternoon and shortly after his family noticed that he wasn't around.
They began to look for him but all they found was the Jet Ski floating on the water.
All search efforts proved futile and so the help of the Cayo Emergency Response and Rescue Team was solicited. Head of the team, William Swan told us that he was in Belize when he got a call for help:
William Swan, Cayo Emergency Response and Rescue Team
"I left from Belize and respond to the Cayo District where I gather up some members of the search and rescue team to go to the area and do an assessment. Upon arriving there I notice the Mennonites were in the area by the lake and we decided to cancel the rescue until the morning. Around 2 o' clock in the night I got another call stating that they know exactly where the body is, so I then gather the team and we went out. We left about after 2 in the morning where we start our search and one of diver Michael Martinez - he was the one, free dive, went down and in 20 minutes after searching he found the body and we retrieve the body from the pond about 3:15 that morning."
Andrea Polanco
"So Mr. Swan when you retrieve the body did it show any external injuries, any signs of bruises or anything?"
William Swan, Cayo Emergency Response and Rescue Team
"What I notice was that blood was coming from his face area like the nose and we see it on the photo that he was bleeding from the nose, I don't know what cause it, the doctor will determine the cause of it."
Andrea Polanco
"The area where he was found, how deep would you say the water was?"
William Swan, Cayo Emergency Response and Rescue Team
"We estimated because we put a 24 foot pipe down into the pond and we average it about 28 feet deep. "
A postmortem conducted this afternoon at the KHMH confirmed that Dueck died from asphyxia due to drowning.
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