Georgia's inland waters took two more lives Monday, in swimming accidents in Lake Lanier and Tallulah Falls Lake, state officials reported.
Spencer Obe Dye, 25, of Gainesville was pronounced dead at 5:55 p.m. after he got in trouble while swimming with a friend in the Bolling Mill area of Lake Lanier, according to Melissa Cummings, spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Division.
The friend pulled Dye from the water and started CPR but was unsuccessful, Cummings said.
In the Tallulah Falls Lake incident, 17-year-old Jordan Phimmachack of Habersham County began struggling and had trouble staying above the surface as a group of teens swam in the northeast Georgia lake Monday afternoon.
Rabun County sheriff's Capt. Gerald Johnson told WDUN Radio that another teenager tried to help Phimmachack to the water's edge but was unsuccessful.
Cummings said the youth disappeared about 5:30 p.m., and Towns County divers located his body in water about 15 feet deep roughly 20 feet from shore at about 7:40 p.m. Tallulah Falls is about 96 miles northeast of Atlanta near the South Carolina state line.
As of June 15, Lake Lanier had seen two drownings and one boating fatality, according to DNR. The comparable numbers for Jan. 1-June 15, 2011 were four drownings and two boating fatalities.
Those numbers did not include the three most recent deaths on Lake Lanier. A June 18 collision of a fishing boat and a pontoon boat killed two brothers, Jake Prince, 9, and Griffin Prince, 13; and a July 6 crash of a personal watercraft and an inner tube fatally injured Kile Glover, the 11-year-old son of R&B singer Usher's former wife, Tameka Foster.
For all of last year, 10 people drowned and 7 died in boating accidents on Lake Lanier, according to DNR.
— Staff writer Alexis Stevens and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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