Details emerge in death of Bridgeport man, 20, on Candlewood Lake

Some details have emerged about events leading up to the death of the Bridgeport man whose body was recovered from Candlewood Lake this week.

Denis Junio Rodrigues Pio was swimming near Chicken Rock — a 25-foot-high rock at the southern tip of Green Island on the Sherman-New Fairfield border — on June 24, when authorities say he started having trouble in the water.

The 20-year-old had been swimming back and forth from the rock to a boat anchored off the Green Island, when “at some point in time, (he) started struggling to swim,” said Dakota Flis, environmental conservation officer.

“They had issues swimming and that’s when things went south,” Flis said.

The report of Rodrigues Pio’s disappearance prompted a multi-agency response the evening of June 24.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection was notified around 7:50 p.m., according to Flis, who said the call “originally came in as a report of a boat accident,” but turned out not to be.

Pio was the second person reported missing on Candlewood Lake in a matter of weeks. On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, a 24-year-old Bristol man, Larry Kwokpo Chan, 24, died in an accidental drowning in the Candlewood Inn area of the lake in Brookfield. It took officials about 21⁄2 weeks to recover his body from the lake.

Officials had also responded to the lake on May 26 to help a man found underwater by his boat on Candlewood. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The state medical examiner’s office confirmed on Friday that 76-year-old Wayne R. Pogers died from hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.