By L.K. Hewlett
St. Kitts Reporter
Friends and family of Kennedy ‘Magic’ Browne are still reeling from the news of the Kittitian man’s tragic death in New York last Saturday evening.
Westchester County police are still investigating the death and could not say for sure what happened on the boat that Browne and some friends were aboard.
They said they are still reviewing the medical evidence and eyewitness accounts to ascertain whether the 31-year-old jumped or dove into the shallow water.
Browne was part of a group of eight friends socializing on a 27-foot Stingray boat.
Eyewitnesses at the scene claimed that after Browne dove into the Hudson River off Croton Point Park, he did not surface. Browne’s friends on the boat, which was anchored about 50 feet offshore, quickly realized he didn’t come back up for air and jumped in after him, a police spokesman said.
“They pulled him out of the water, called 911 and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). One friend on the boat was an off-duty New York State correction officer with some emergency medical training,” he said.
The attempts at CPR proved futile and Browne was pronounced dead at Phelps Memorial Hospital Centre. The police spokesman said it appeared Browne did not have a pulse from the time he was pulled from the water, around 6:45 p.m.
Earlier this week, the Westchester County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Browne’s death was an accident. The coroner also found that Browne suffered damage to the vertebrae in the neck area as well as the spinal cord when he went into the water.
That finding indicates that an injury in the water may have played a role in the drowning. The medical examiner’s office ruled that the official cause of death was asphyxiation, yet Kieran O’Leary, a spokesman for the county police gave this brief comment, “We don’t have any conclusions at this point.”
Browne’s wife of eight years, Tequana Browne, was left with the heart-wrenching task of telling the couple’s one- and a half-year-old daughter about the tragedy.
She was quoted as saying that her husband ‘was very loving, he helped everyone and would drop everything to help someone out’.
Family and friends described Browne as a dedicated family man who was devoted to his daughter.
Browne was a former member of the Kittitian band ‘14 Minus’ before he migrated to the U.S. in 1997.
He leaves to mourn his wife, daughter, his mother, three sisters and two brothers. Family friends told The Observer that Browne would be interred in New York.
