Man dies in Bellagio fountains
Onlookers couldn’t save him as swim turned into struggle
Las Vegas police said a “local transient” man drowned Friday in the Bellagio fountains on the Strip.
In a Friday afternoon briefing in front of the fountains, Metropolitan Police Department Capt. Dori Koren said the man’s state of mind when he jumped into the water was unclear.
Koren said the man, who was between about 40 and 50, “engaged” some tourists before jumping in and swimming out into the middle of the fountains, where the water can be as deep as 13 feet.
The man then began struggling. A tourist jumped in to help, but he “unfortunately wasn’t able to get very far,” Koren said.
“It was too late by the time we responded,” he said.
Clark County Fire Department Deputy Fire Chief Jennifer Wyatt confirmed earlier Friday that divers had recovered the man’s body from the fountains.
Kayla Eklund, a 21-year-old college student from Michigan, said she called 911 after she and a friend witnessed the man struggling to swim.
Before the man jumped in, he was talking to himself,
place to go?” Kirkpatrick said Friday.
The county’s Multi-agency Coordination Center, which consists of public safety, health care, education and government agencies in Southern Nevada tasked with handling the local coronavirus response, is trying to answer that question.
Potentially costly approach
But the preliminary solution will not come cheap: Kirkpatrick said it could cost the county and local jurisdictions up to $135 million to secure locations for that many students through nine weeks at an estimated price tag of $30 per student per day.
She said the center is planning as if the remote-learning model approved by the School Board on Tuesday would last through the first quarter of the school year, though trustees have requested updates on the status of the pandemic every 30 days.
Kirkpatrick said the student estimate is based, in part, on a recent district survey that found parents strongly supported a full-time return to in-person schooling.
Officials are reaching out to a broad range of groups to find facilities, acknowledging that currently available space is not enough to fully support the district’s reopening plan. Kirkpatrick said discussions about additional assets have been had with nonprofits and the private sector.
Kirkpatrick pens letter
In a letter Tuesday on behalf of the Multi-agency Coordination Center to School Board trustees requesting use of school facilities to “allow broader access to childcare in the Southern Nevada community,” Kirkpatrick said the present student capacity for beforeand after-school programs, run by local governments and supported by school sites, was a little more than 14,000 across the valley.
And there is space for about 3,100 in full day care.
While Kirkpatrick said the school district made clear it did not want to open up its facilities, the district said in a statement Friday that the School Board “has not had enough time to fully consider the points made by the MACC at this time.”
The district did not offer any new solutions to child care on Tuesday, saying it would work with municipal partners on a fix.
“It’s a priority that we have to do for the best interest of our children, and we will just keep plugging forward,” Kirkpatrick said. “We have a lot of great people at the table.”
‘A lot of space’ needed
The race for more facilities and staffing, which would need to include plans for transportation and meals, is difficult enough based on the sheer volume but made more complex by social distancing rules.
“That’s a lot of space that has to be taken into consideration,” Kirkpatrick said.
As outlined in the letter to the School Board, Kirkpatrick on Friday raised other concerns about a home-based model: access to technology and healthy meals, student mental health and the availability of creative methods to ensure students kept up with studies.
Officials are not seeking babysitters, she added, “but at the same time people have built their livelihoods around having their kids in an educational component during working hours.”
Kirkpatrick also acknowledged there existed “a very fine line ” between establishing facilities for tens of thousands of students and simply opening up schools. But then she pointed to how it was the School Board’s decision to adopt the remote-learning model.
Contact Shea Johnson at sjohnson@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @SHEA_LVRJ on Twitter.