‘We’ve got a pulse!’ Amazing teamwork — and luck — saved Beaufort’s Billy Keyserling
Former Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling, who almost drowned in the Beaufort River Saturday, is expected to make a full recovery, thanks to a rescue involving strangers and professionals that one person said involved “great heroic actions.”
Uncanny good luck helped, too.
“He doesn’t seem to have suffered any long-term damage,” said Paul Keyserling, Billy’s brother.
The Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet spoke with several people who were on the scene Saturday, including Paul Keyserling, and boaters who described pulling Billy Keyserling from the water and performing CPR before rushing him to the dock outside of Beaufort Memorial Hospital, where additional help awaited.
The 73-year-old Keyserling was the city’s mayor for 12 years until 2020.
He has been moved out of the intensive care unit and is able to talk, Paul Keyserling said Tuesday morning. But at this time, Paul Keyserling said, Billy is a bit “grumpy” because he’s recovering from broken ribs, which occurred during CPR.
“We’re grateful,” Paul Keyserling said of the help the two men received as they clung to a catboat in the Beaufort River.
Sailing turns into emergency
Winds were 15 to 20 mph Saturday when Billy and Paul set sail in an 18-foot catboat in an informal race with two other boats.
A gust of wind caused their boat to capsize on the Beaufort side of Spanish Point, Paul Keyserling said, after the boat failed to right itself as it is designed to do. A tangled rope apparently prevented the sail from spilling and relieving the pressure from the wind.
“It’s really not a complicated story in terms of what happened,” Paul Keyserling said.
Billy Keyserling tried to retrieve a rope and “for some inexplicable reason” swallowed a lot of water, Paul Keyserling said. That turned the situation into an emergency.
To the rescue
Among the people who came to the aid of the two Beaufort men as they clung to the catboat included Lexie Murray Benton, a registered nurse in Colleton County; Ashley Higgins, another nurse; and Tara Hodges, office manager at the City of Beaufort/Town of Port Royal Fire Department.
Benton and Higgins were part of a group of friends who were out on the Beaufort River in three boats headed to Skull Creek Boathouse on Hilton Head to celebrate Benton’s husband Charlie’s birthday. One of the boats, according to Benton, was lagging behind and called them for help after they came across a capsized sailboat with two men clinging to its side.
When Benton and her friends arrived, it seemed like “nobody was in distress,” Benton told the newspapers. At the time, she and her friends had no idea who the two men were.
“For some reason, Billy went under,” she said. “Paul said it was because he was maybe going to cut the sails. … When he came up, he started vomiting water and his head flopped facedown, and Paul said, ‘We’ve got to get him out of the water.’”
Heroic rescue
Two people in Benton’s group, Mikey Covington and and Chris Jarrell, jumped in the water to hold Billy Keyserling up, Benton said.
“At that point, he (Billy Keyserling) was unresponsive,” Benton said. “He ... completely went blue.”
Tara Hodges and her husband Phillip also were out on the river that day. They pulled up and got Billy Keyserling out of the water. Without the help of the Hodges family, Benton said, there “would not have had a good outcome at all.”
“It all happened so fast,” Tara Hodges said. “(Paul) was distraught, but he wasn’t hurt.”
Once they were able to bring Billy Keyserling aboard, Lexie Benton, with the help of Higgins, administered CPR as the boat headed toward the dock at Beaufort Memorial Hospital. “They’re (Covington and Jarrell) traumatized, truly,” Benton said. “They just started crying. … I do this for my day job, and it still was traumatic.”
Higgins wrote on Facebook that she had never witnessed “such great heroic actions before in my life, from such a large group of people.”
Amazing sound on the dock
For Lt. Clint Holmes, who has been with the City of Beaufort/Town of Port Royal Fire Department for 10 years, hearing a call over dispatch about someone heading toward the hospital’s docks is not unusual this time of year. After Memorial Day, the firefighters respond approximately once a weekend to various injury calls, he said.
When he rallied his team, made up of Lt. Trey Carter and firefighters D.J. Henry and Zach Painter, to go take a look at what was going on, they had minimal information and were told simply that one of the people involved “didn’t look good.”
With binoculars and from his vantage point on the hospital’s helipad, Holmes said he could see Higgins performing chest compressions as the boat headed towards the dock. At that point, he said he knew they needed a unit from Beaufort County EMS.
Following a flurry of activity on the dock, with the first responders surrounding Billy Keyserling, came a moment of relief, according to Hodges.
“We’re doing all of this, and we all of a sudden hear one guy say, ‘We’ve got a pulse, we’ve got a pulse!’” Hodges said. “And it was, like, amazing the second we heard it.”
Beaufort County EMS then transported Keyserling from the dock to the nearby emergency room.
Serendipity a factor, too
Speaking about the incident Tuesday morning, Paul Keyersling said he couldn’t say how long the entire episode lasted — 5 minutes, 10 minutes — but “it seemed like a long time.”
He credits the actions of the good Samaritans and the professionals on shore with saving the life of his brother, who began breathing on his own again on the dock.
“There’s a lot of serendipity in this,” Paul Keyserling said.
Besides the training of the people who came to Billy Keyserling’s aid, the catboat capsized within sight of the BMH dock.
Also, it was a Saturday, and there were many boats on the river. When a boater is in trouble, Paul Keyserling notes, other boaters will immediately stop. It’s not the same, he said, as it is when a car breaks down.
Besides saving Billy, Paul Keyersling noted, two other boats organized the rescue of the catboat.
“It’s what you hope will be there when you need it,” Paul Keyserling said. “People who stopped to help didn’t have to do that.”
