Leonard Hippolyte tried to swim underwater from the shore to this boat but did not make it.
An autopsy has confirmed that Leonard Hippolyte of Baron’s Drive, Soufriere, died from drowning. It had been reported that Hippolyte drowned at the bay in Baron’s Drive on January 4, after he bet that he could swim underwater to a boat some distance from shore. Several Baron’s Drive residents confirmed the story to the STAR. The other man allegedly involved in the wager told this reporter he knew nothing about any such bet.
Leonards brother, Benjamin Hippolyte, told us the body had been found ninety feet below the water’s surface by rangers of the Soufriere Marine Management Association. He also provided an account of his own efforts to retrieve his brother’s body. Benjamin said that after being told where Leonard had dived, he “stayed there for a little while. After a minute had passed the other fellers told me it had been over three minutes since they saw him.” It was then he ran to the other side of the road, “took a diving glass and then I just dived in the sea and I started looking for him, but I couldn’t see him.”
Unfortunately, Leonard’s body had sunk too deep into the water to be retrieved by his brother. He recalled: “The place where he fell is so deep. Well, from where the divers actually pulled him up, that’s where I was exactly, so I was hovering over him, but I couldn’t see him because the divers said they got him at about 90 feet.” The Marine Rangers, in a telephone interview, put the depth at 100 feet.
The Hippolyte family, as well as the wider Baron’s Drive community, is still rocked by the circumstances of Leonard Hippolyte’s drowning. As his brother told us: “Everybody was actually very sad about that. Everyone. Everyone. Not even just the family but everyone from the area because he is somebody who is okay with everybody and he likes giving jokes and different things like that; so, everybody was okay with him. Everybody was just saddened by that.”When asked if his brother usually partook in those sorts of bets, Benjamin replied: “No, no, no, no. That’s not something he normally does.” On reports about his brother’s drinking just before his death, he stated that he didn’t know because he wasn’t there, but that was what he was told. However, he did state that his brother liked to drink. “That’s what I was told. He was drinking. Well I wasn’t there to see that he was drinking. I know he is somebody, he likes to drink, he likes to drink.”
Now that the autopsy has been performed, the Hippolyte Family is now making funeral preparations.–
