Father Drowns While Fishing With His Son
An 11-year-old boy watched Saturday as his father toppled off their fishing boat and into the depths of a pond near their house, police said.
By the time Hunter Freeman could grab his cell phone and call 911, his father was lost to the murky water.
Nobody would see Curtis Freeman alive again.
Freeman, 37, died in a small pond ringed by pines that he had been fishing in for most of his life. He had grown up in the area just southeast of Raleigh, according to those who knew him, and lived with his family on Wall Store Road nearby.
He and Hunter went to the pond on Saturday after grabbing lunch at Bojangles’, according to Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison.
“They were having a day out fishing together,” Harrison said.
Freeman fell out of the boat about 2:30 p.m. Within minutes, rescue teams from Garner, Raleigh, Wendell and elsewhere were racing to the little pond off Rock Quarry Road near Whitfield Drive.
Firefighters and emergency workers lined the north bank as men in boats searched a corner of the pond for Freeman. After more than an hour of searching, a couple of men in a Wendell-owned boat slowly pulled Freeman’s body to the surface. Radios crackled, and Harrison told the journalists assembled nearby to turn their cameras away.
On a driveway near the eastern shore of the pond, Freeman’s family and friends gathered. As Freeman’s body was wheeled away to the state medical examiner’s office in Chapel Hill, Freeman’s wife wailed in the back seat of a blue car.
Report By NewObserver
