Drowned student was a Chinese PhD candidate (zuan)

Drowned student was PhD candidate

Katie Mercer
The Province; with a file from Canwest News Service

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The 29-year-old Simon Fraser University student who drowned at Lightning Lake Saturday has been identified as Huichun Yu.

Yu, a Chinese exchange chemistry PhD student at SFU, was on a hiking trip in Manning Park with friends from SFU's Christian Students and Scholars Association. He decided to cool off in the lake at about 2 p.m., police said.

Friends noticed he was missing 20 minutes later and began to frantically search the water.

Carlos Del Rosario, who spoke with Yu's friends, said he was told Yu wasn't a strong swimmer.

"One of his friends went in the water with goggles and all of a sudden he came up and he was just screaming in another language," said Rob Lemon, an off-duty Delta firefighter.

Lemon, a former lifeguard, dove into the cold water and pulled out Yu's lifeless, blue body. Along with off-duty nurses and first-aid-trained campers, Lemon worked on Yu for 90 minutes, managing to get the near-dead student breathing and with a pulse.

But it wasn't enough. Yu was pronounced dead hours later at the Royal Columbia Hospital.

It was a death that should have been preventable, said Lemon.

"For such a tourist attraction, for such a family park, they have no first aid equipment nearby," said Lemon. "You realize how unsafe you are."

Now his friends in the CSSA and the business school at SFU are raising funds to fly Yu's parents to B.C. from China so they can collect their only child's remains.

n A Victoria woman who drowned during a guided river-rafting expedition last weekend has been identified as 23-year-old Kelsey Hemstock.

Hemstock was on a raft with six other passengers in the Chilliwack River on Saturday when it hit a rock and flipped in an area known as the Tamihi Rapids. Rescuers later recovered her body, which was wedged in a submerged, undercut crevice of a large rock.

Const. Lee-Ann Dunlop said the RCMP have confirmed the death was accidental.

kmercer@theprovince.com