Seven people were killed on Georgia waterways over a busy holiday weekend, officials reported, including one who drowned in a lake with a dark history.
Five people were killed and four injured in a two-boat collision Saturday on the Wilmington River near Savannah, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Four of the dead were from a single family. Searchers didn’t locate three of the bodies until Sunday morning.
The cause of the crash is still under investigation. One of the survivors has been charged with boating under the influence, the Savannah Morning News reported.
Warning: The below video shows a body being recovered from the water.
“Rough day today out here,” Bill Koster, the chief of operations for Chatham County Emergency Services, told reporters Saturday following the collision.
A town is also mourning the drowning death of 5-year-old Kaiden Franklin, who vanished while playing on a float Saturday on Lake Allatoona at Clear Creek in northwest Georgia. His body was found later that afternoon, according to the Georgia DNR.
He had just graduated from kindergarten at Model Elementary School in Rome. “Our deepest pain is having to share the passing of one of our own school babies,” the school said in a statement on Facebook.
A 20-year-old man was also found drowned Sunday in Lake Lanier at a Margaritaville resort in the foothills of northern Georgia, the Forsyth County News reported. Police were withholding his identification pending notification of his family.
More than 200 people have died in swimming and boating accidents since 1994 in the lake, which has an unusual, spooky history. The popular 38,000-acre lake north of Atlanta was created in the 1950s by deliberately flooding valley communities and covering up existing cemeteries.
Ecologists continue to slam the lake’s damage to the natural environment, and many locals are convinced it’s haunted. One enduring tale involves the “Lady of the Lake,” dressed in blue, who’s supposed to be a woman who drowned in 1958.