Lake Keowee 911 calls reveal harrowing struggle between boater and man he saved from drowning, then shot
Michael Ruiz - South Carolina 911 calls reveal grim details of the Lake Keowee shooting that left a 29-year-old man dead last month when he attacked the boaters who helped him out of the water after he fell off his personal watercraft with a young woman.
Drew Morgan and Hannah Ayers, 19, fell off of his yellow Sea-Doo RXP into the lake on March 15, according to police. A couple in a boat nearby, John and Debra Dotson, 74 and 70, pulled them out of the water.
But Morgan, allegedly drunk, belligerent and irrational, began fighting with the man who’d just pulled him to safety. According to a 911 call, Morgan disabled the boat’s ignition when he damaged the kill switch and attacked his rescuers.
Harrowing 911 calls reveal how a tense struggle dragged on for a grueling 15 minutes as police rushed to the scene. While Morgan can be heard speaking in the background in much of the audio, authorities said his final moments were redacted under state law that protects a dying person's last statements in a 911 call.
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"We have a drunk in our boat trying to hurt us!" Debra Dotson tells a dispatcher in one of four calls released by the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office.
At one point, during a tense struggle before the shooting, two women can be heard alternately sobbing and praying over the phone as the dispatcher tries to reassure them. Then they scream.
"He just had to shoot him, please hurry!" Debra Dotson shouts. "Oh my God he’s shot now…My husband had to shoot him -- he’s trying to choke him and knock him out of the boat!"
She asks her husband if he’s OK, and when he says he is, she orders him to lay Morgan down and "try to save him." But her husband’s back had been hurt in the struggle, and he couldn’t move him, she said.
"Listen, you don’t understand," she tells the dispatcher. "He’s sitting in our captain’s chair in the boat, and he’s gasping for air -- I think it’s his dying breath."
Before the shooting, Morgan could be heard repeatedly with slurred speech, and multiple callers reported that he continually resumed fighting with the boater after breaking apart.
"God bless, we don’t want to push him back in, and I don’t want him to shoot," the wife says about 4 minutes into her call.
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At another point, she puts the phone down and Ayers picks it up.
"He’s really drunk right now," she says of Morgan to the dispatcher, her voice shaking. According to an incident report previously obtained by Fox News Digital, she later told officers that the group on the boat tried to calm Morgan down but, "nothing worked."
Police later said they found empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia in Morgan’s pickup truck.
"C’mon boy, don’t die," Debra can be heard sobbing, after the dispatcher asks her to begin performing chest compressions.
A second caller, who identified himself as Michael Hallisey, of Connecticut, reported what he saw from his waterfront property on the shore.
"The same two people who caused this problem in the first place, the ones who fell off the Jet Ski, they’re hitting the guy who saved them," he told the dispatcher in a separate call.
Just over 14 minutes into his call, a boom can be heard.
"Oh boy…that was a gunshot," he tells the dispatcher. "You guys gotta hurry up."
"I heard that gunshot," she replies, before switching on her radio and informing officers on the way to the scene. "I heard a gunshot."
Hallisey then says he believes the shot was "a warning."
"Nobody’s hit," he says – but the group continues "tussling."
But four minutes and 40 seconds later, after pacing to the front of his house to meet police and then looking back, he tells the dispatcher "the guy’s been shot."
At that point, he says that the boat is approaching his dock, and a few minutes later, he tells the dispatcher that "it looks like one of them’s dead" and "there’s blood everywhere."
The Oconee County Sheriff’s Office said last month that Dotson was defending himself and would not be charged in Morgan’s death.
Fox News' Sarah Rumpf contributed to this report. Read more of this story on FOX News.