A man was pulled from Mirror Lake Sunday afternoon and transported to Wexner Medical Center in critical condition, according to an official from the Ohio State Division of Police.
University Police Lieutenant Rick Green said a bystander called 911 after seeing someone in the lake, but Green did not have information on whether the person knew the man or not.
A female OSU graduate student was walking to the Student Involvement Fair at about 5 p.m. when she and her friends noticed someone in Mirror Lake.
“We were walking by and we saw a guy. We just saw his hands, and we thought someone was swimming, and my friend was actually like, we were mentioning … when everyone goes swimming for the Michigan game, and she was like, ‘Oh no one goes swimming now, it’s too warm out, except for that guy,’ and then we saw his hands before he went down,” said the student, who spoke with The Lantern on condition of anonymity because of professional reasons. “And we thought it was a joke at first, and some other girls called 911, and then they pulled him out probably like five minutes later, and I don’t know, it doesn’t look good.”
The student said the man was probably in the water for somewhere between five and eight minutes, and paramedics came about three minutes after he began struggling. She estimated that the paramedics performed CPR for about 10 minutes before taking the man away in an ambulance.
Joshua Sharrock, a 31-year-old Columbus State Community College student, was visiting Mirror Lake when he saw a crowd gathered there and noticed the seemingly unconscious man.
“There’s like 20 paramedics, everybody is just pumping on this guy’s chest and it blew up like a balloon. They were really pumping hard,” Sharrock said. “Nobody was talking, everyone was staring. Nobody was even on their phones.”
Sharrock, who said he was 15 to 20 feet from the man at the time, said he heard from a bystander that the man had appeared to be swimming in Mirror Lake.
“Somebody told me when I came down there he already had reports of him swimming in the lake for some reason,”Sharrock said. “There were a lot of paramedics … but they carried him off, he was limp, he was lifeless. He might have been breathing, it might have been really shallow.”
An Office of Student Life spokeswoman said the office had no information to share and the University Police did not immediately respond to phone requests for more information.
