BIRMINGHAM - AL -
"He said I don't have good news," Gabe Watson said in a recorded 2003 interview in Australia. "I did everything I could, but we lost her."
This was an emotional Watson five days after his wife, Tina, drowned in 2003.
"I asked Gabe, 'Where's Tina?'," Kenneth Snyder said. "His response was, and it's very short, that 'she didn't come up'."
But Kenneth Snyder, who is a SCUBA expert, talked with Watson after physicians failed to resuscitate Tina.
"It wasn't a plausible story," he said. "It didn't make sense. I said 'Gabe, what happened?' He said 'We were 10-12 minutes into the dive and about 20-30 feet of water. Tina was in a panicked state, knocked my regulator off and my mask off my face. By the time I got everything back on she was 10 feet or so below me with her arms out stretched looking at me and sinking'."
"Doug [Milsap] and I both used the same terminology and that was 'Bull [expletive]. That didn't happen'," Snyder said.
First, Snyder says at 10-12 minutes they shouldn't have been at 30 feet under water, but 85 feet under water. He says Watson wouldn't have needed his mask, but only his regulator to breathe. As for Tina being over weighted, he says she would have known that as soon as she got in the water and, furthermore, would have become lighter during her dive, not heavier.
Stanley Stutz was diving with another group at the time of the incident. He remembers seeing Tina in distress and floating before Watson swam down to her.
"It struck me that he was, at the time, I thought he was trying to save her and then they split apart," Stutz said. "He went to the surface and after they split apart she sank."
