A 13-year-old boy is fighting for his life after wading too far into Prospect Park Lake on Tuesday afternoon and nearly drowning, authorities and witnesses said.
The child was one of five boys splashing around in the water just off East Drive near the Peristyle in the southern end of the park around 7:30 p.m., said Alana Thomas, 20, a retail worker from Brooklyn.
She said she heard him tell his friends that he was in trouble.
“It was a group of boys, five of them playing in the water,” she said. “One of them went in too deep. He told his friend as soon as he went in that he couldn’t swim.”
She and her friend watched as the boy flailed in the water before going under.
“It was very scary, he was only a young kid and he was drowning,” Thomas said.
Her friend Zieeda Clarke, 18, said she was still shaken by the event.
“All the kids were low-key wet. The EMTs rolled him out and put him on a stretcher,” Clarke said. “He had nothing on but his boxers. They were pumping his chest but he wasn’t moving. It was very traumatizing see it.”
The teen, a sixth grader at Walt Whitman Middle School, was taken to Methodist Hospital initially, but then transferred to an unidentified hospital in Manhattan.
“He’s breathing again, but he’s not conscious,” his 16-year-old brother Samuel Joassaint said.
“The kids called the police because he wasn’t coming out of the water. He went to the park to be with his friends. They were all swimming. I have no idea why he went into the water because he doesn’t know how to swim.”
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