A 12-year-old girl from a top Harlem school drowned during a “chaotic” end-of-year class trip to an unguarded Long Island beach yesterday as her horrified friends helplessly watched from shore, witnesses and authorities said.
“I can’t believe what happened, I feel totally empty,” said a devastated Juan Suriel, whose daughter Nicole was a sixth-grader at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering.
Nicole was among 24 excited students who had won a school fund-raising walkathon and were being rewarded with the “recreational” trip to Long Beach.
It’s not clear if the ocean dip was part of the plan. But the kids — accompanied by a first-year male teacher, a female instructor and a parent chaperone — made a beeline for the water on the blazing-hot day, said Brittany Polini, 18, who watched the tragedy unfold as she sat with friends.
No lifeguards were on duty, since the beach season doesn’t officially kick off until Saturday. Signs prohibiting swimming were posted at beach entrances.
“If I knew that there were no lifeguards, I wouldn’t have let her go,” Juan Suriel said.
Polini said, “The kids threw their bags down and were screaming and ran in. It was chaotic. There was no order.”
Long Beach City Manager Charles Theofan said, “One of the detectives told me that the teacher told the kids not to swim, but how do you control 12-year-olds?”
Polini said, “Some of the kids were in bathing suits, and some were in T-shirts and shorts. They had towels and beach gear.
“I saw some of them playing on the rocks and I said, ‘Someone’s going to get hurt.’ The tide was really low, but the current was very strong.
“They were all swimming out to the sandbar. And then they started playing on the jetty. . . . Then I saw this girl’s head bobbing and I said ‘that girl’s far out there. Who’s watching them?’ Everybody knows you’re not supposed to go in the water [without lifeguards].”
When those on shore realized Nicole and two pals were in trouble, three adults — including the female teacher and a man — ran in to help, witnesses said.
The teacher got into trouble in the powerful surf and was banged against the jetty.
“We just couldn’t get to her . . . we could barely hold on,” said the distraught parent chaperone, Victoria Wong.
Two of the students were quickly rescued, but Nicole was found by firefighters and off-duty lifeguards after about 80 minutes.
“Her classmates were sitting in a circle” on the sand, surrounded by adults who tried to shield them from the horror, said beachgoer Brad Trettien, 29.
Polini said the victim’s friends “were crying and using her cellphone to call her parents.”
Nicole was declared dead at Long Beach Medical Center.
Family friend Edith Guerrero called the victim a “sweet, playful kid . . . I don’t know why she was at the beach. Her mother . . . was always so protective of her.”
Theofan said the beach will officially open a week early this year — manned with lifeguards every day beginning Saturday — because a man drowned two days before the season started last year.
Additional reporting by Yoav Gonen, Joe Mollica & Kate Sheehy