JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Regina Brinson heard a boom before the metal walkway gave way beneath her feet, plunging her into the water beneath the state-operated ferry dock on Georgia’s Sapelo Island. As strong currents carried her and others falling from the shore, she shouted to her 79-year-old uncle: “Take my hand!”
Isaiah Thomas tried to grab his niece’s hand. But he also grabbed her shirt and dragged her head beneath the surface of the water. Three days after the weekend’s tragedy, Brinson cried loudly Tuesday as she recalled her fight for survival and what happened next.
“I had to grab his fingers one by one and pull them off my shirt,” Brinson said. “And I pulled him back up and I saw his face. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? What have I done?’ And he floated past me.”
Thomas was one of them seven people who died Saturday after the harbor gangplank collapsed, dozens of people were waiting to board an afternoon ferry for a ride back to the mainland. The tragedy happened on a day when 700 people visited Sapelo Island for a fall festival honoring the small Gullah-Geechee community of black slave descendants.
Brinson and grieving family members of two others who died stood with civil rights attorney Ben Crump at a news conference in Jacksonville on Tuesday as he called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which operates the dock, is in charge the state investigation why the aluminum gangway failed. The dock was built in 2021. Crump said he doesn’t trust the state to investigate on its own.
The dead were all between 73 and 93 years old, but Crump said their advanced age did not make their deaths any less devastating.
“These seniors were vibrant people,” Crump said. He added: “They did not die of natural causes. They died due to negligence.”
Still largely untouched and untethered to the mainland by roads or bridges, Sapelo Island is home to one of the South’s last remaining communities of people descended from slaves, known as Gullah or Geechee in Georgia. Scholars say their isolation from the mainland allowed the Gullah-Geechee people to retain much of their African heritage.
But only a few dozen residents remain in Hogg Hummock, founded after the Civil War by the enslaved Africans who worked on the island’s cotton plantation. Many island descendants have left for work on the mainland. Others have sold to outsiders land that their families had owned for generations. A lack of services, including emergency aid, and battles over property tax increases have driven remaining residents to fight their local government in court for more than a decade.
In contrast, the Cultural Day Festival held Saturday was a time for celebration, as island residents and visitors mingled over gumbo and smoked mullet, and during basket weaving and fishing net making demonstrations.
Thomas had traveled to the island with dozens of members of a senior club in Jacksonville. Since the 1990s, he lived with an older sister who served as his caregiver. His family knew him as “Bubba,” and he was a devoted church member who volunteered at the soup kitchen, said his sister, Katrena Alexander.
“I don’t think you can find anyone nicer,” Alexander said. “He would do anything you asked him to do. He would never say no.”
On Saturday, Thomas and his niece Brinson helped a family friend cross the gangway with her walker at the island’s dock. Brinson said she watched in horror as Carlotta McIntosh fell from the broken aisle. She didn’t survive.
McIntosh was 93 years old, but she rarely stopped moving. She had taken a cruise in December and told her granddaughter that the secret to her longevity was reciting the Serenity Prayer daily.
“There was no old in her,” said the granddaughter, Ebony Davis. “She was lively. She was feisty. She was feisty. She was my world. She died doing exactly what she wanted to do: living life to the fullest.”
Jacquelyn Carter, 75, was a third member of the Jacksonville Senior Club to die on Sapelo Island. According to her daughter Vanessa Williams, she had several upcoming trips planned. When she was home, Carter would often check on friends who weren’t feeling so spry – to make sure they had food and their medicine, and even to help clean their house.
“There was nothing wrong with her,” Li Williams said. “She was completely healthy and perfectly fine. And she should have come home.”
William Johnson Jr., 73, and his wife’s cousin, 76-year-old Queen Welch, also died in the collapse. They traveled from Atlanta to the island festival with other family members. Johnson was an Air Force veteran who retired from defense contractor Lockheed Martin, his daughter Alaina Johnson said The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Welch was known as the family matriarch.
The McIntosh County coroner identified the others who died as 77-year-old Charles L. Houston, a chaplain for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and 74-year-old Cynthia Gibbs of Jacksonville. In a statement, Impact Church of Jacksonville said Gibbs was a longtime member and “always willing to lend a helping hand, quick with a funny joke, full of energy and so consistent that we had a staff workspace for her in our ministry offices.” .”
Georgia Natural Resources officials say a team of investigators with expertise in engineering and accident reconstruction – with assistance from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation – is working to determine why the harbor walkway failed.
The dock was rebuilt in 2021 after Georgia officials settled a lawsuit by Hogg Hummock residents who complained that the ferries and docks did not meet federal accessibility standards for people with disabilities.
The same lawsuit also accused McIntosh County of failing to provide adequate resources to respond to emergencies on the island. When the province settled with the residents in 2022 it agreed to build a helipad on Sapelo Island. But residents trying to rescue people after the collapse said the landing pad has still not been constructed and a helicopter used to evacuate people on Saturday had to land in an overgrown field full of holes dug by wild boars.
Sapelo Island also has no medical facilities. Resident Jazz Watts said a health care provider planned to open a clinic in the county-owned building that long served as the island’s community center. But those plans were scrapped this past year when county commissioners opted to lease the space for a restaurant.