James Clarke, a New Jersey resident, died of a heart attack after saving his son and two other teenagers from a riptide. After dragging the boys out of the water, Clarke immediately succumbed to a heart attack.
After exiting the water, Peter, Clarke’s son, said he tried to perform CPR on his father. Jane said a nurse happened to be nearby and took over. Then the paramedics arrived. Neither were successful in resuscitating James.
According to the Asbury Park Press:
James Clarke was sitting with his wife Jane – “my bride,” he always called her – reading books on the beach on the evening of June 5 at the end of a weekend away from their Watchung home. A friend of his teenage son had scrambled out of the surf. Peter Clarke, 15, and two other boys were caught in a riptide. One had sucked saltwater into his lungs.
James, whose friends called him Jimmy, dropped his phone and his copy of “Factory Man” and dashed into the waves to rescue them. Within moments, he and the boys had made it back to shore. But the 55-year-old Jimmy faltered, stopped and then collapsed, dead of an apparent heart attack, his wife said.
To make the story even more heartbreaking, is his wife’s account of what happened:
“I looked over at him and I thought how much I loved him and how perfect it was, and then one of the boys came up and said the boys were in trouble,” said Jane.
“The boys were out and then all of a sudden my husband, like, sat down, and I swear, he looked at me one last time,” Jane said. “I saw his blue eyes. And he knew what was going on.
“I literally looked over at him and thought in my head, ‘This is the best that we’ve ever had it,'” she remembered. “And that’s my last memory of him.”
Check out the full story on the Asbury Park Press website, where they have an amazing video on the story. What an absolute tragedy. This man sounded like a true hero in every sense of the word. RIP James.
[h/t Asbury Park Press]
