http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/brooklyn/nyc-drown0715,0,2629867,print.story?coll=nyc-manheadlines-brooklyn
Brooklyn teen drowns at Conn. park
BY GALIA GARCIA-PALAFOX AND PETE BOWLES
July 16, 2004
A camp counselor from Brooklyn, described by relatives as a good swimmer, drowned Wednesday night while on an outing with 350 youngsters at a Connecticut amusement park, police said.
Yossel Leichter, 19, who was working this summer as a counselor at Munkas, a Jewish day camp near Kiamesha Lake in Sullivan County, was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, about two hours after he was pulled unconscious from a spring-fed lake at the Lake Quassapaug Amusement Park in Middlebury.
Lt. Richard Guisti, a spokesman for the Middlebury Police Department, said the death appeared accidental. He said police received an 8:22 p.m. call of a drowning at the lake.
Guisti said about 350 children from three day camps were at the park at the time — including about 40 youngsters who were swimming in the small, private lake. Leichter was pulled from the water by lifeguards before police or paramedics arrived, Guisti said.
Witnesses told police that Leichter had been missing anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, Guisti said. He said it was the first drowning in the lake in 12 years. A spokeswoman for the amusement park referred callers to the police.
"It shouldn't have happened," Leichter's brother-in-law, who gave his name only as Isaac, said at the family home in Williamsburg. "He was into swimming very much. There was no explanation for such a thing."
Leichter, who lived with his mother, three brothers and four sisters, was a member of the Nitra community and had just graduated from the Nitra School. Relatives said he was engaged to be married but that no date had been set.
"He was good with children and loved kids, and that is why he was working as a counselor at the camp," Isaac said. He said Leichter attended the Munkas camp each summer and that this was his first year as a counselor.
"He was a typical Hassidic boy who was learning and studying," Isaac said. "He was a good boy. God decided he need him also."
Joel Green, 25, of the Pupa Community Synagogue, said Leichter prayed there several times each day, usually in the morning. "He was a very Jewish boy," he said. "It was a real tragedy for everyone in the synagogue."
About 200 people attended Leichter's funeral yesterday at the Yereim Orthodox Chapel in Williamsburg. He was buried in Monsey, N.Y.
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