BENEATH THE OCEAN’S
surface waits a different world—quiet, full of wonder, shimmering with life. Carter Viss loved that world. It’s why he left Colorado to study marine biology at Palm Beach Atlantic University. It’s why he got a job at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center, just up Highway 1 on Florida’s east coast. And it’s why he spent so much free time snorkeling in the reef system just a few hundred yards from the famous Breakers resort in Palm Beach.
This particular Thursday morning— November 28, 2019—was especially nice. It was Thanksgiving. Tourists and locals hit the beaches. The water was flat, the sky blue, and the underwater visibility spectacular. Carter, 25, and his coworker Andy Earl, 32, spent a couple of hours among the sharks, eels, turtles, octopuses, lionfish, and angelfish. They netted some small specimens for Carter’s personal collection. Finally, around noon, they began their journey back to shore.
To a diver underwater, outboard engines have a clear, unmistakable sound. Swimming on the surface, however, Carter didn’t hear the speedboat. It was just 50 feet away— and heading straight for him.
The was a white 36-footer with an aqua-colored hull. But the boat’s most striking feature was a trio of massive 400-horsepower Mercury outboard engines with fiveblade propellers. All that power had it gliding over the water at 50 mph— much too fast with swimmers nearby.
Christine Raininger was sitting atop her paddleboard waving her hands, yelling, “Hey, slow down!” But the people on the boat—retired Goldman Sachs executive Daniel Stanton Sr.; his 30-year-old son, Daniel Jr.; his son-inlaw; and two grandchildren—never heard her warnings over the roar of those engines.
The was almost on top of Carter by the time he saw it. He pulled desperately to one side, getting his head and upper torso out of the boat’s path before it ran him over, sending him tumbling and somersaulting. The
propeller of the far-right engine had sliced his right forearm clean off, turning the water around him crimson.
Carter
This can’t be happening, thought. It was too bizarre.
Inhaling seawater and his own blood, Carter realized he would drown if he didn’t swim. But he couldn’t swim. His right arm was gone. Both his legs were smashed, dangling uselessly beneath him, and his remaining hand was damaged. Bobbing for a second, he screamed for his life before slipping beneath the surface.
Andy Earl heard his friend’s cries. He swam toward Carter, reaching him at about the same time as Raininger, who had watched the horror unfold. While Earl kept Carter’s face out of the water, Raininger squeezed his upper arm to stem the blood flow, then fashioned a tourniquet from the cord on her paddleboard.
Meanwhile, on the a Talley Girl, frantic Stanton Jr. threw the engine into reverse, stopping alongside the stricken swimmer. Horrified, in shock, he helped Earl and Raininger load Carter onto the dive platform at the boat’s stern.
Carter I’m not going to make it, thought, pain searing through the adrenalin. it. No way I’m gonna make
“God is with us,” Earl reassured his
friend, over and over, holding his hand as Talley
made for shore. Girl “God is with us.” Carter, a devout Christian, felt his fear and panic melt away. In its place came total surrender, a kind of blissful acceptance. Dying felt as if he were diving again, this time into another beautifully peaceful realm.
AS IT TURNED OUT, the worst day of Carter’s life was not without things to be thankful for. Earl and Raininger being nearby, for one. The speedboat reversing so quickly. The first responders who waded into the ocean to meet Girl. The ambulance Talley that raced to St. Mary’s Medical Center. The 12-person critical-care team, already briefed and suited up, that received Carter in the trauma bay barely 20 minutes after the boat strike.
Also fortunate was the fact that Robert Borrego, a critical-care surgeon and the medical director of trauma at St. Mary’s, was on duty. The son of a Cuban fisherman, Dr. Borrego had come to America at age nine. Thirty years at St. Mary’s and a stint at a field hospital in Iraq had acclimated him to dealing with massive trauma. Many soldiers he’d worked on had been devastated by improvised explosive devices, commonly known as IEDS.
Carter’s injuries were not so different, with one exception: Major open wounds in the ocean are doubly perilous, as the victims keep bleeding because blood can’t clot, and infection is very likely.
The doctor did a quick assessment. Carter was in Stage 4 shock, meaning he’d lost at least 40 percent of his blood volume and was on the verge of multi-organ failure. A diver had retrieved Carter’s arm, but there was no hope of reattaching it.
Next, Dr. Borrego noted the damage to Carter’s left hand and wrist. His right knee was dislocated and deeply lacerated, his kneecap nearly severed, and his femur fractured. His lower left leg and ankle were smashed, with deep gashes in the flesh, and his left foot was turning blue.
It was a miracle Carter had gotten to the hospital alive, but every moment counted. One option was to amputate
both legs. Amputation could be done quickly and would lower the risk of infection. But one doctor, Dilhan Abeyewardene, pointed out that Carter was young and active, with his entire life ahead of him. Surely, it was worth trying to save his legs. Dr. Borrego agreed.
A team of three surgeons and two residents set to work. First, they trimmed the loose skin around the mangled stump of Carter’s upper arm. This procedure, called a guillotine amputation, makes for a cleaner cut, allowing for easier cleaning of the wound before it’s closed. Next, doctors reset both legs, encasing each in a fixator, a sort of exoskeleton that maintains proper alignment as the bones begin their slow repair process. They also set the fractures in Carter’s left hand and wrist and repaired the soft-tissue damage.
After an intense three and a half hours in the operating room, liberally infused with eight units each of red blood cells, plasma, and platelets, Carter was moved to the ICU.
The next 48 to 72 hours would be critical. The human body can fight only so many battles at once before shutting down. All anyone could do now was wait, and hope.
IN CENTENNIAL, a city outside Denver, Chuck and Leila Viss were taking a chilly, snowy walk after church when Leila’s cell phone rang. The display showed a Florida number. She assumed it was a telemarketing robocall.
Back in the car, heading home to start dinner, she saw there were two voicemail messages. She put the phone on speaker so Chuck could listen as well. It was a sheriff in Palm Beach County. As the mother of three active boys—carter is her middle son—leila wondered: What’s Carter done?
All they recall hearing was “Boating accident … lost one arm … trying to save his legs.”
Panicked, they pulled into a parking lot. “We took turns losing it and comforting each other,” said Leila.
The day became a desperate, blurry scramble of canceled dinner plans, urgent calls, postponed work deadlines, and attempts to book flights on a holiday. Chuck finally found two seats on a plane out of Denver that evening, with a layover in Boston.
Frayed and exhausted, Leila and Chuck reached St. Mary’s Intensive Care Unit around 10 a.m. The atmosphere was calm but intense, as doctors and nurses moved with purposeful efficiency. But any sense of calm for the couple disintegrated
CARTER HAD LOST A LOT OF BLOOD AND WAS VERGING ON ORGAN FAILURE.
when they saw their son. The sight of Carter in bed, swollen and bandaged, his right forearm missing, fixators on his legs, and tubes down his throat, was overwhelming. Leila and Chuck had to be helped out of the room to compose themselves.
So began their vigil. The pair took turns by their son’s bedside, where Carter was hooked up to a ventilator. He was tormented by hallucinations—“icu psychosis,” doctors call it—which can be caused by medicine, infection, even low blood oxygen. He knew his family was there, but so were strange, gruesome creatures that were crawling all over him.
“Get them off me,” he begged. Carter was so out of it that he didn’t know he’d already had four operations. Infected flesh had been excised, a titanium rod inserted in his shattered shinbone, and hardware installed in his left wrist and right knee. Nor did he recall the many visits he’d had from church friends and Loggerhead colleagues.
One or both of his parents was always by his side. Chuck, an employee of the software company Oracle, was able to work remotely. Leila, a church organist and piano teacher, needed to be back in Centennial. So Chuck took up residence in a nearby condo and Leila commuted.
Over the 68 days Carter spent in the hospital, Chuck and Leila noted each milestone. The first day he sat up. Being moved out of ICU to a “step-down” room. The first time he wiggled his toes. The first time he sat in a wheelchair. The first day he ate actual food: hospital Jell-o and chicken broth Chuck brought him. The day Carter stood unaided. And a few days after that, his first shaky, excruciatingly painful steps.
Arguably the most significant milestone came the day Carter had his breathing tube removed. That’s when Dr. Borrego told him the battle was 90 percent won. Carter says that in that moment, he knew two things: I’ve and got a long road ahead of me, I’m gonna make it.
He decided then and there that he would put his spared life to good use by educating others about ocean safety and conservation. Heading into yet another surgery, he told his parents, “I can make a bigger difference now than I ever could before.”
But before he could do that, he had one last battle to fight: getting off the heavy doses of morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl that had eased his pain. Dr. Borrego gradually reduced his dosages until his patient, determined to use nothing more than Advil and medical marijuana, tore off his fentanyl patch.
Withdrawal made for a harrowing few days, but Carter, as Dr. Borrego puts it, “has incredible mental strength—just extraordinary.”
Carter was discharged from St. Mary’s in February 2020. By June, seven months after the accident, he
returned to work at the Marinelife Center. Fittingly, his duties include helping with the rehabilitation of loggerhead sea turtles that have been injured in boat strikes.
Today he can bend his right knee only 90 degrees. For a while, residual infections had him on and off antibiotics. He’s been fitted with a prosthetic forearm but finds it cumbersome. Still, Dr. Borrego says that his recovery has been almost miraculous.
Physical healing is one thing. The emotional legacy is less obvious, more nuanced. “The accident itself,” Carter says, “I try not to remember how real it was, the panic and horror. It feels more like remembering a dream now, or a nightmare. And I try not to think of what I can’t do, and focus on ways to work around things.”
AS CARTER RECOVERED,
and then got on with his life, Daniel Stanton Jr. was going through his own agony. Consumed with guilt, he told the that he kept reliving Palm Beach Post the scene of the accident over and over in his mind. “Not a day has passed since Thanksgiving where I haven’t thought about the terrible events of that day and all that Carter has been through since,” he said. “I imagine it will weigh on me every day for the rest of my life.”
Last September, Stanton was charged with willful and reckless operation of a vessel, a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
“The prosecutor gave us several options,” says Chuck. “Carter insisted he did not want Stanton to face incarceration. He said, ‘I’d rather have him working with me on ocean safety than sitting in a jail cell.’”
Two months later—almost a year from the day of the accident—carter Viss and Daniel Stanton Jr. entered the courtroom. The sight of Stanton caused Carter to flash back to the accident. It was jarring, but thankfully brief. A few minutes later, Carter stood and read a victim statement.
“Imagine yourself doing the thing you love,” he said, recalling the day of the accident. “Then, in a matter of seconds, your joy and contentment is interrupted by a sudden impact.”
After describing the horror he had endured, Carter said, “This is not a story from a war zone, but from an area you once called your ‘happy place.’” And yet he somehow found the silver lining in his trauma. “I believe that everything happens for a reason and all the pieces are in a place to make positive changes for marine safety,” he said.
Then it was Stanton’s turn to speak. Addressing Carter directly, he said, “I cannot fathom the physical and emotional pain you and your family have endured.’’
The Visses knew the remorse was genuine. “You could see the pain in his eyes,” Chuck said.
Heeding Carter’s wishes, the judge sentenced Stanton to 75 hours of community service, a year’s probation, a $1,000 fine, and a mandate to work with Carter on legislation to enhance ocean safety and conservation.
After the judge handed down his ruling, Carter shook Stanton’s hand and said quietly, “Let’s make a difference.”
And they are. For starters, the two are advocating for clearer “diver down” markers off beaches and strict speed limits for boats.
Has the legal resolution led to forgiveness? “Forgiveness comes from the heart,” says Carter. “I feel like I’m going in the right direction. If I were him and had to live with the guilt and remorse, I’d almost prefer to be in my shoes. But if I can ease someone else’s pain, I will.”