The man whom police described as the driver pf a “hit-and-run-on-the-water” surrendered to authorities in Australia after they said he ran down and killed a scuba diver there. They had been searching for him for more than a day.
The accident occurred on a clear Sunday afternoon several hundred yards offshore in Port Phillip Bay near Melbourne. The victim and a friend, both 29 years old, were scuba diving. The friend had waved down a nearby boat to make sure the driver could see them, before he found the victim lifeless in the water.
A passing commercial boat picked up both of them and took them to shore. Paramedics performed CPR on the diver but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said the two men were experienced divers who followed the rules. “They were using buoys and floats and flags, everything that’s required to obviously display that they are swimming in the water,” a sergeant said.
A spokesman for the Coast Guard there said the boat driver should have known he’d hit something. “It’s usually fairly obvious that you’ve hit something,” he said, “particularly a solid object. Hitting anything on the underside of a boat will typically give the noise to suggest that something has been struck.”
After the accident, police shut down boat ramps in the bay as they searched for the hit-and-run boat. The driver, 41, turned himself in the next day. Read more:
