WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010
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A sole survivor lives with guilt and criticism
schuyler from C1
The accident attracted interna- tional media attention primarily because of the identity of two of the other men. Cooper, 26, was a linebacker for the Oakland Raid- ers; his friend Corey Smith, 29, was a defensive end with the De- troit Lions. A fourth victim, Will Bleakley, 25, had played football at the University of South Florida with Schuyler, his best friend. In his book and an interview, Schuyler describes the hours after the 21-foot boat overturned as a nightmare of exhaustion, mad- ness and death. Numbed by the cold and beset by hallucinations, Cooper, Smith and Bleakley suc- cumbed in succession.
Schuyler said he wrote the
book (with New York Times sportswriter Jeré Longman) to honor his friends and to set the record straight. He resents the speculation that surrounds the episode — that the men were drunk, that they had fought each other in their final, desperate hours, that they had given up. Schuyler insists that the men act- ed honorably and kept one an- other alive for as long as their strength and sanity held out. “If there was going to be a book, it had to be told the correct way,” Schuyler said from Tampa, where he has resumed his work as a per- sonal trainer. “They can’t speak for themselves.” Schuyler’s account, as well as his motives, however, have come under bitter attack. Just after the book was published, Cooper’s widow, Rebekah, issued a long public statement deploring Schuyler’s “ever-evolving re-crea- tion of events.”
Among other things, Rebekah Cooper took issue with Schuyler’s assertion that he was her hus- band’s personal trainer; that the book “greatly exaggerates” his friendship with Marquis Cooper; and that Schuyler has never fully explained the circumstances of Cooper’s death to her.
“I will tell you with absolute
certainty, if [Marquis Cooper] had walked away from a tragic experi- ence like the one that took his life, authoring a book and having it on the shelves within a year and fi- nancially exploiting the deaths of others simply would never have been a consideration,” she wrote. “. . . Marquis is not here to share his experience, so why would we assume a one-sided account that has never been scrutinized against objective investigation?” Schuyler said the accident haunts him, but Rebekah Coo- per’s criticism is a final blow. In a voice low with weariness and re- gret, he said of her rebuke, “It just killed me.”
A combination of errors
The trip was supposed to be a
lark. Marquis Cooper loved taking his boat into the sunny waters of the Gulf of Mexico to fish for am- berjack and grouper and maybe some shark. A few months earlier, Cooper
had befriended Nick Schuyler at the gym where Schuyler worked as a trainer. Soon, they were joined at the gym by Corey Smith, Cooper’s friend and a former teammate. The three men had gone fishing
a week earlier, and Cooper sug- gested a second outing for Feb. 28. Schuyler was enthusiastic and asked whether he could bring along his friend Will Bleakley, whom Schuyler had met while playing football at USF a few years earlier. It was arranged:
REASONSTOBEPRETTY
byNeilLaBute
NOW PLAYING! DIRECTED BY DAVID MUSE
nature, Schuyler said the book is his “best recollection” of what happened, poured out in two weeks of interviews with Long- man. “If I was making stuff up, I guess I would have buttered my- self up a little more,” he said. “I lived through it and tried to ex- plain it the best I could.”
Schuyler said he still asks him- self “what if” questions about the episode. Could they have been better prepared for disaster? Could they have survived if they had done something differently? Why did he live while the others perished? The first question may be the easiest to answer.
Although Schuyler said he holds Marquis Cooper blameless, the book suggests Cooper’s “inex- perience” as a boat operator placed all of them in danger — an assertion that Rebekah Cooper has vehemently disputed. Cooper’s boat, for example, had no emergency radio beacon. There were no flashlights or working flares on board. Nor had any of the men told friends or family members exactly where they were going. Longman quotes Timothy M.
CLIFF MCBRIDE/TAMPA TRIBUNE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOSPITALIZED:In an
image taken from video, Schuyler arrives at Tampa General Hospital. At right, a note left on Marquis Cooper’s truck asks him to call police.
Cooper would supply the boat and fishing equipment; Schuyler and Bleakley would bring sand- wiches and beer. The accident, Schuyler said, was a combination of errors. When the anchor wouldn’t budge, he said, Cooper grew frustrated. A week earlier, facing the same problem, Cooper had to cut the line to free his boat, losing a $200 anchor in the process. No way he’d let that happen again. Bleak- ley suggested yanking it off the bottom with the boat’s motor. It was also Bleakley’s idea, Schuyler said, to undo the one-inch anchor line from the front of the boat and retie it to a cleat at the rear — a decision that proved disastrous when Cooper pushed the engine to its limit. None of the men panicked in
the water at first, but the urgency of their situation was obvious. No one was wearing a life preserver. And only Schuyler, who had bun- dled up after getting seasick and vomiting earlier in the day, had on anything warmer than swim trunks and a T-shirt. As a cold front moved in, swells as high as 15 feet began to rake the men clinging to the overturned vessel. Schuyler credits Bleakley with giving them a fighting chance; Bleakley repeatedly dove under the boat to free three life jackets and a seat cushion, which Bleakley donned for flotation. But as the hours wore on, the elements began to tell. Schuyler said Cooper, a sturdy 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds, was the first to de-
flashing white light. He’s not sure whether any of it was real. Bleakley held out until the next
day, about 12 hours after Smith died. Unlike Smith and Cooper, Schuyler said, the exhausted Bleakley became torpid, almost like dead weight. He began to slip off the boat so frequently that Schuyler attached a cable from the boat to Bleakley’s wrist, twist- ing the other end around his own wrist to form a crude leash. It was no use; Bleakley died in his arms.
The ‘what if’ questions
CHRIS O’MEARA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
cline. His speech started to slur, his movements became uncoordi- nated and he began shivering vio- lently. As Schuyler held him, Coo- per hallucinated and struggled. Several times he tried to yank off his life vest and dive under the boat.
According to research that
Longman includes in the book, those behaviors are consistent with the onset of hypothermia, a condition in which the body’s core temperature falls and blood flow to the extremities is restrict- ed in an effort to preserve the heart, lungs and brain. Some hy- pothermia victims become so ad- dled they try to take off their clothes, a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing.” Other victims try to crawl into tight or confined spaces like a hibernating animal, a behavior called “termi- nal burrowing.” As Cooper entered his final mo- ments about 15 hours after the ac- cident, Smith began his own de- cline. Schuyler writes that he “looked mad and mean,” his eyes rolling. He swore crazily and pulled at Schuyler and at Cooper’s
lifeless body. Under the twin assault of the
waves and Smith, Schuyler loos- ened his grip on Cooper and watched as he sank into the dark water. He and Bleakley now turned their attention to Smith, who was growing more aggres- sive. Smith eventually pulled him- self upright on the hull, loomed over Schuyler and raged, “I’m-a kill you!”
And then he leaped into the wa-
ter, jerked his life jacket over his head and barrel-rolled beneath the surface, Schuyler said. That was the last Schuyler saw of him. In the long, lonely hours that followed, Schuyler began to see things. Once he thought he spot- ted land, and he and Bleakley made an aborted swim for it. At another point, he said he saw sharks, and then a mysterious
As compelling as Schuyler’s ac- count is, it raises an enormous question: Is it true? The book is not just Schuyler’s side of the story; his is the only side possible. The bodies of the three dead men were never recov- ered, and the corroborating evi- dence for his account is only par- tially satisfying. An investigation of the accident by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Com- mission concluded that the boat had indeed sunk in a manner con- sistent with Schuyler’s descrip- tion of it. Longman, the co-author, said
that knowing what happened with certainty is impossible, but nothing indicates that Schuyler is willfully embellishing or lying. “Nick has been very consistent” about what happened since the day he was rescued, Longman said.
Despite Rebekah Cooper’s criti- cism of the story’s “ever-evolving”
Close, commander of the St. Pe- tersburg Coast Guard sector, this way: “They were inexperienced boaters, and they were in an ele- ment they weren’t prepared for. . . . It’s the equivalent of taking your light jacket and saying, ‘I’m going to go climb Mount McKin- ley.” It’s hard to know why each man died as he did and when he did. All four were young, supremely fit athletes. “I don’t have a good an- swer for that,” Schuyler answers. “I was just lucky, I guess. I could easily be the one who didn’t make it back.”
Schuyler said he doesn’t have nightmares about the episode, nor has he felt compelled to seek therapy. But he said the past year has been difficult. His relation- ship with his live-in girlfriend, Paula Oliveira, whom he had vowed to marry, recently fell apart. Cooper’s and Smith’s rela- tives have maintained their dis- tance (none would cooperate with Longman in his research on the book, and attempts to reach them for this article were unsuccess- ful). As for Rebekah Cooper’s sug-
gestion that he is trying to cash in, Schuyler is adamant in his ob- jection (proceeds from the book are going toward boater safety education efforts and to a memo- rial fund for the three men). “I’ve turned down so many things that could have made me so much money,” he said. “That’s the last thing I’m interested in doing. I just want to get the straight story out there . . . I thought this was the best thing I can do for those guys. I want to honor their memo- ry.”
farhip@washpost.com
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