August 14, 2003|By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
NEW RUSSIA, N.Y. - To four teen-agers from the suburbs, Split Rock Falls was a magical place - cool water rushing between the granite walls of a mountain ravine, forming pools for hours of lazy summertime swimming.
On Tuesday afternoon, the four men - Adam Cohen, 19; Jonah Richman, 18; Jordan Satin, 19; and David Altschuler, 18 - returned to their favorite childhood summer haunt to find it engorged by a summer of heavy rain. By the end of the day, all four men, each an experienced swimmer, was dead, drowned in the waters they knew well.
In what officials here described as one of the worst drowning accidents ever in the Adirondack State Park, all four died after Altschuler slipped off a narrow granite ledge into a foaming pool of water whipped into a frenzy by a tumbling waterfall. In a final act of friendship, Richman, Cohen and Satin, who had grown up together on Long Island, jumped after him to try to save his life. The laws of physics were against them, though.
"They call it a drowning machine," said Lt. Fred J. Larow, a forest ranger with the state Department of Environmental Conservation who helped recover the bodies here, about 20 miles east of Lake Placid. "The water was so turbulent and aerated that there was no way they could stay above water. Even the strongest swimmer in the world couldn't have survived it."
The four worked as counselors at Camp Baco, a summer camp in the town of Minerva deep in the Adirondacks, and had gone to Split Rock Falls, a popular swimming spot about 45 miles north of Minerva. It was their day off, and they were accompanied by a group of 21 counselors from Camp Baco, a boys' camp, and its sister camp, Camp Che-Na-Wah, for girls.
Richman, Satin and Cohen grew up in Woodmere on Long Island and had been friends since the days of floppy Little League caps and themed birthday parties. They had become close friends with Altschuler, who was from Philadelphia, over several summers at camp.
At 3 p.m. Tuesday, the teens were scrambling on a rock ledge along the raging Boquet River about 1,500 feet downriver from a large pool that marks the beginning of Split Rock Falls. Altschuler lost his footing on the 14-inch-wide shelf along the riverbank and slipped into a foaming pool of water.
He was immediately sucked under, the police said, and Cohen, Richman and Satin jumped in to rescue him.
But they were helpless in the raging current, whose waters were so aerated that they defeated the natural buoyancy of the human body, officials said. Several other camp counselors looked on in horror as the young men were sucked one by one into the foam, the police said.
One counselor ran to a nearby house to call 911, and rescuers arrived within minutes. But it took only moments for the young men to drown.
"They didn't stand a chance," said Essex County Sheriff Henry Hommes. "No one, no matter how strong a swimmer. They were doomed from the moment they hit the water."
Richman's body was recovered downstream from the falls Tuesday. The other bodies were retrieved yesterday afternoon.
Yesterday, as the teen-agers' parents traveled here to claim their sons' bodies, the lifelong friends of the Long Island victims struggled to comprehend their deaths. The only thing that seemed to make sense was that the friends all died together.
"It doesn't surprise me that they did this," said Matt Linsky, a longtime friend of the three Long Island teens and an acquaintance of Altschuler. "They would have jumped in front of a bus for each other. They were that devoted to each other. They couldn't stand by and watch a friend in trouble."
The three friends lived the lives of popular, athletic kids in upper-middle-class Long Island. They went on Caribbean cruises with their families, attended Phish concerts and carried each other home if someone drank too much.
"There's no way to characterize these kids with a single term or way of looking at them," Linsky said. "They all had good heads on their shoulders. They all had very big plans in life."
Cohen was the most outgoing of the three, the one who plunged himself into his Advanced Placement classes during the weekdays in high school, then hurled himself into parties on the weekends, said David Perlman, a friend. Cohen swam 100-meter runs and cheered up his friends by listening soberly to their problems before advising them not to worry about it.
Cohen was about to start his second year as a business major at the University of Wisconsin.
Satin was the one to start mischief, while Richman was the one to diffuse it. One night, several of the friends began talking about a giant inflatable rubber duck that sat on top of a shopping mall. Satin suggested they shoot it with a BB gun, but Richman, sensing disaster, vowed that he would disown them if they did it.
Richman, who was a captain of the high school swim team with Cohen, was also devoted to school and was pursuing a journalism degree at Northwestern University. The sports editor of his high school newspaper, The Spectrum, Richman dreamed of being an ESPN anchor.
Satin played football and lacrosse and slouched through high school. But he returned transformed after his first year at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was a business major.
Yesterday, friends of the four gathered at Linsky's home in Hewlett. There, they pored over yearbook photographs and online photo albums from Camp Baco's Web site.
"I had to turn over all the pictures in my room," Jeremy Kanefsky said as he hugged a friend and wept. "I'm not ready to deal with this yet. I never will be."
