When Jessica and Derek Simmons first saw the beachgoers pausing to stare toward the water, the young couple just assumed someone had spotted a shark.
It was the evening of July 8, after all, peak summer season in Panama City Beach for overheated Florida tourists to cross paths with curious marine life. Then they noticed flashing lights by the boardwalk, a police truck on the sand and nearly a dozen bobbing heads about 100 yards beyond the beach, crying desperately for help.
Six members of a single family — four adults and two young boys — and four other swimmers had been swept away by a powerful and deceptive riptide churning below the water’s surface.
“These people are not drowning today,” Jessica Simmons thought, she told the Panama City News Herald. “It’s not happening. We’re going to get them out.”
She was a strong swimmer and fearless in the face of adversity. But others had tried to reach them and each previous rescue attempt had only stranded more people.
There was no lifeguard on duty, and law enforcement on the scene had opted to wait for a rescue boat. People on the beach had no rescue equipment, only boogie boards, surf boards and their arms and legs.
“Form a human chain!” they started shouting.
Roberta Ursrey was among those caught in the treacherous riptide. From 100 yards away in the Gulf of Mexico, between crashing waves and gulps of salt water, she heard the shouting, she told The Washington Post.
By then, Ursrey and the other eight people stranded with her had already been in the water for nearly 20 minutes, fighting for their lives. Ursrey and the others had ventured into the water to rescue her two sons, Noah, 11, and Stephen, 8, who had gotten separated from their family while chasing waves on their boogie boards.
On shore, the human chain began forming, first with just five volunteers, then 15, then dozens more as the rescue mission grew more desperate.
Jessica and Derek Simmons swam past the 80 or so human links, some who couldn’t swim, and headed straight for the Ursreys.
“I got to the end, and I know I’m a really good swimmer,” Jessica Simmons told the News Herald. “I practically lived in a pool. I knew I could get out there and get to them.”
She and her husband started with the children, passing Noah and Stephen back along the human chain, which passed them all the way to the beach.
By the time Jessica Simmons reached Ursrey, the 34-year-old mother could hardly keep her head above water.
She woke up on the sand to the sound of more screams in the water.
Someone yelled that Ursrey’s mother, Barbara Franz, still in the water, was having a heart attack. At one point, the 67-year-old woman told the rescuers “to just let her go” and save themselves. Instead, Ursrey’s husband and nephew held Franz’s body up as they struggled to keep their own heads above water.
“That’s when the chain got the biggest,” Ursrey said. “They linked up wrists, legs, arms. If they were there, they were helping.”
Nearly an hour after they first started struggling, just as the sun prepared to set, all ten of the stranded swimmers were safely back on shore.
Franz remains hospitalized, her daughter said. She suffered a massive heart attack and an aortic aneurysm in her stomach, but has been taken off the ventilator and is considered to be in stable condition.