A family in Dallas, Georgia, is grieving after their patriarch – a former pro baseball player turned police officer – died saving five others from drowning while they all recently vacationed, as authorities and an online page in his honor tell it.
Chase Childers, 38, “displayed extraordinary courage and selflessness … ultimately paying the highest sacrifice with his life” in front of his wife Nataley and their three children, said a GoFundMe page launched to support his family. “His bravery, kindness and love will always be remembered.”
Childers – a former member of Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles – had gone with Nataley and their children from their home in Georgia to Pawleys Island, South Carolina, on vacation, as the news station WCBD from nearby Charleston reported.
He noticed another family of about five in distress while swimming amid a rip current near the island on 13 July, and he leapt into action by heading into the water with another person to help get them out, Pawleys Island police said in a statement.
The family and the man accompanying Childers made it back to the shore. But Childers did not emerge, prompting police, firefighters and the US coast guard to search for him.
Crews then found Childers dead and recovered his body about 90 minutes later, Pawleys Island police said.
A statement on the GoFundMe page for Childers’ family said he gave “everything he had to save” the family caught up in the rip current, which is a fast-moving column of water flowing away from the shore. Officials urge swimmers caught in rip currents to swim calmly in parallel to the shore.
“Tragically,” the GoFundMe page said of Childers, “he was unable to stay above water.”
Childers had grown up north-east of Atlanta, winning a state baseball championship in 2003, according to the city’s Journal-Constitution newspaper. He later played for Georgia State University’s baseball team, signed with the Orioles after turning pro and logged two seasons in the minor leagues with clubs in Florida and West Virginia.
After his playing career ended, Childers served as a police officer in Cobb county, Georgia, for three years beginning in 2011, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Cobb county’s police force awarded Childers a life saving award in 2012. And the GoFundMe page started for Childers’ family after his death noted that he had been honored “for saving several lives”.
Pawleys Island police chief Michael Fanning told WCBD that he believed Childers’ “first responder instincts” simply “kicked in” on the day he died trying to save a family in trouble.
The GoFundMe page for Childers’ family had raised more than $160,000 as of Friday. It called him “a loving son, a dedicated brother, a treasured friend, an exceptional father to his three wonderful children, and the husband of his beautiful wife, … who had been his soulmate and best friend since they were teenagers”.
“Words are hard to find at this moment as … his wife and three children attempt to navigate life without Chase,” the page added.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
