A high school graduate celebrating his last summer with friends before heading off to college drowned in a Massachusetts lake, his shattered relatives and police said.
Apurba Devkota, an 18-year-old aspiring aeronautical engineer set to attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst this fall, died late Monday at a hospital after being pulled from Upper Mystic Lake in what authorities said was a tragic accident, the Boston Globe reports.
“He just told me he was going to a party to hang out with his friends, and I thought it would be a barbecue or something,” Devkota’s sister, Asmita, told the newspaper. “I didn’t know it would be a lake.”
A preliminary investigation revealed that the teen — who was just weeks away from his 19th birthday — was unable to swim and dropped below the water shortly after getting into the lake. Divers later found him in about 20 feet of water, the Globe reports.
“It’s like a bad dream, and I can’t wake up,” Asmita, 26, continued. “I wish I could go back in time and tell him not to go — not to go into the lake.”
Devkota drowned near a sailing pavilion operated by Tufts University, which noted “dangerous” swimming conditions in the area due to proximity to active boating lanes, according to a statement to the Boston Herald.
Devkota, originally from Nepal, moved to the United States when he was 16 and initially had a difficult time transitioning to life as an American teen.
But the Medford resident found his niche after focusing on schoolwork, finding a job waiting tables at an Indian restaurant and forming a tight group of friends, his sister said.
The teen’s mother and two sisters convinced him to stay local for college, opting to go to UMass rather than heading south to Florida.
“We begged him to stay,” Asmita Devkota said. “He couldn’t wait to go to college. He’d say, ‘I’m going to make you all proud.'”
Devkota, who recently graduated from Medford High School, planned to study math and biology as a college freshman, with hopes of later becoming an aeronautical engineer, according to his sister.
The superintendent of Medford Public Schools said in a statement to the Boston Herald that Devkota was a “well-respected young man who excelled academically and socially,” while Medford Mayor Stephanie Burke said she was “heartbroken” following the teen’s death.
The Greater Boston Nepali Community will help Devkota’s relatives pay for his funeral, WBTS reports.
“We are devastated that we lost such a young, aspiring community member,” the group wrote on Facebook. “May his soul rest in peace.”