Divers pull 2 from sunken car

Three children and a man were hospitalized Saturday after being pulled from a pond on the Southeast Side.

The children were taken to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and the man was taken to Mount Carmel East hospital, said Shawn Kosar, a deputy battalion chief for the Columbus Division of Fire.

None of the four people’s identities or conditions were immediately available Saturday afternoon.

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Kosar said a call was received at 12:18 p.m. Saturday about a car being in the water at the Hartford on the Lake apartment complex in the 4500 block of Lakeside Drive North.

Kosar and the fire department arrived to find that a passerby had pulled two children out of the water and had performed CPR. Once responders determined that others were still in the car, the fire division’s dive team

arrived to rescue the other two occupants: an 11-yearold boy and his father.

“Our first rescue crew went out with just surface flotation devices on and located the vehicle while the divers were getting deployed,” Kosar said. The

first crew was “standing on top of the vehicle so the divers could see where it was and determined the windows were open.”

The dive team pulled the 11-year-old out of the car at 12:38 p.m., and pulled the father out two minutes later.

The mother had been in the car but was out of the pond when the fire personnel arrived; she was not injured.

Kosar said he didn’t know how the car got in the water, but the Columbus Division of Police’s accident investigation unit was on the scene.

Police had yet to determine the type of car in the pond, which Kosar estimated is about 12 feet deep.

Kosar also said there was a language barrier with the victims, and officials were working through an

interpreting service to try to determine what happened.

The apartment complex is just west of Catalpa Park in a triangular area bounded by Interstate 270 to the southeast, Interstate 70 to the north and Hamilton Road to the west. Noe Bixby Park is on the opposite side of I-270 from the area.

hpalattella@dispatch.com @hellapalattella