Daughters seek identity of boater they say saved their father’s life
By BETSY WEBSTER
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OVERLAND PARK, KS (KCTV) — An Overland Park man’s family has a stranger to thank for saving his life on Longview Lake. But first, they need to find him.
Jordan Knox was with her dad, Dennis Knox, at Longview Lake Saturday. She and her 2-year-old daughter stayed at the marina when he and her mom took off on their jet ski. By mid-afternoon, she saw an ambulance pull up. She had no idea it was coming for her dad.
“I think it’s hitting him pretty hard,” Knox said of her dad’s current mindset. “Because he really, he thought he was going to die.”
Knox described her dad, age 51, as the rock of the family. He has four kids and nine grandkids.
“I don’t even want to think about the what-if,” she said. “This man saved my dad’s life, so we want to find him.”
She said her parents can’t recall all the details, just that they were thrown from the jet ski.
“[My dad] remembers just looking down in the water, and he couldn’t move his arms to flip over, and he said he just took one last breath,” Knox recounted.
Her mom swam over to turn his face up, but he wasn’t conscious. She screamed and a boat pulled up with a man and dog on board.
“He picked him up by his life jacket, got him into the boat, and just immediately started performing CPR,” Knox continued.
Several others then jumped in to help in one way or another.
“For everyone just to kind of jump together and work as a team to help them out, that’s amazing to me,” Knox reflected.
She and her family have tracked down most of them, but they won’t feel like their thanks are complete until they find that man and his dog.
“I want to give him a hug,” Knox said. “I do, it’s crazy. We’re very thankful, to say the least.”
Her dad is out of the hospital, she said, with a fractured sternum and nearly all of his ribs fractured. But he is alive, healing, and grateful.
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