HUNTINGDON COUNTY, Pa — Jumping in a lake for a swim can be fun but it can also be dangerous. Park rangers say just a few simple steps can save your life and others.

20-year-old Douggreco Bailey went swimming with his friends in Raystown Lake Wednesday but unlike his friends, Bailey didn’t make it to shore.

“A life jacket would’ve done a lot,” said Allen Gwinn, a park ranger at Raystown Lake.

Bailey’s friends say they last saw him swimming to shore...for hours, volunteer fire fighters and first responders searched for Bailey. Eventually, they found his body.

"When you’re swimming in deep water, if you’re jumping off the boat, if you’re trying to go from one place to another and the water is kind of deep, if you can’t stand up, you should wear a life jacket," Gwinn said. "If you get in trouble, you can’t swim far enough or you have some type of unexpected incident, the life jacket will bring you back up to the surface where we can get emergency services and response to you to help. That would’ve been the case here."

Earlier this year a similar tragedy happened at Canoe Creek State Park in Blair County. Both have one thing in common: neither victim wore a life jacket. Park rangers say that life jacket can save your life.

Yep, sometimes it can, it really depends on the situation that occurred, you know, the incident that occurred," said Jenna Conner, another ranger at Raystown Lake. "Where they went down, what they were doing when they experienced when they got in troubleso yeah, there’s a lot of instances.”

And when an emergency like this happens, you have to act fast.

“Just calling in, again, all of that emergency personnel, making sure we get enough people there to help because ultimately, the more bodies on the ground, usually the better,” Conner said.

And that was exactly what went down last week.

“In this particular case, when someone’s in trouble, they typically will call 9-1-1, 9-1-1 dispatcher alerts the emergency services, alerts us, and we respond to the incident, and then we team up to provide whatever services are needed in that particular situation to get the, the best care and the quickest care that we can to, to the victim,” Gwinn said.

Rangers say this was the only death at the lake this year.

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