Driver hailed for saving tourists from rip current at Louisiana beach: ‘I just locked in’

A shuttle driver recently used his bare hands to rescue three tourists ensnared by a potentially deadly rip current off the southern Louisiana coast, actions which state officials hailed as “heroic”. In an interview published on 15 June, Reliant Shuttle driver Jordan Matthew told Guardian reporting partner WWL Louisiana that he had just dropped off a group of tourists from Oklahoma at a beach on Grand Isle days earlier when one of them frantically flagged him down. Matthew was told a young boy had been enmeshed in a rip current, he recounted. A woman – evidently a relative of the child – then went in to try to save the boy but was pulled by the dangerous current herself, he said. And furthermore, Matthew learned, the current had caught a third member of the group as she swam nearby. Matthew recalled being able to see that “they were bobbing under, [and] the waves were crashing over their heads” at the edge of an area known as the Elmer’s Island wildlife refuge. “It was a rough sight,” he said. Despite having no formal lifeguard training, Matthew instinctively ran into the water. He initially pulled the boy and one of the women to a spot where the water was shallower – then he led them to shore. Matthew then swam out to the other woman after she had drifted farther out, grabbed her and managed to haul her back to the shore – including by carrying her over his shoulder at one point. …