A father was killed by a lightning strike at the New Jersey Shore on Sunday, June 23 while trying to warn other beachgoers of the incoming story.
As reported by WABC, 59-year-old Patrick Dispoto was fatally struck by lightning as he attempted to warn children of the storm at the Seaside Park beach. He was getting ready to leave the beach with his girlfriend, Ruth Fussell, when he decided to go back to make sure nobody got hurt.
"What was going through my head was the sheer shock of what happened," said his 27-year-old son, Cole Dispoto, in an interview with CBS New York. "He did die a hero. ... He said. 'I'll be back in a minute, I'm gonna grab those kids off the beach [and] make sure nobody gets hurt.' From my understanding, there was a lightning strike not too far away. Most likely hit the sand and sand conducts electricity very well and kind of went through and his body was the first thing it ran into."
Fussell said she tried to stop her boyfriend from going back to the beach, but he insisted that he would only be one minute. He made sure she safely got back to his truck, but it was the last time she would see him alive. She called his phone three times to no response, so she returned to the scene roughly 15 minutes later and found him face down in the sand. A stranger was standing over his body and was asking for someone to call 911.
"I administered mouth to mouth, and the guy's wife was doing chest compressions," Fussell said. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Seaside Park lifeguard captain Jim Rankin says lightning warning systems that have already been implemented at other beaches will hopefully stop something like this from happening again. "You can set the radius as to how far away you want it to track it... five miles, 10 miles, 15 miles, and you can set the radius and it will trigger those sirens to go off," he said.
