Brek Green
By Shawn Jarrard
Towns County Herald
A Woodstock, Ga., man accidentally drowned in Lake Chatuge early Saturday morning while vacationing at a family friend’s house in the Hidden Valley Road area of the county, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division.
The Towns County Coroner’s Office has confirmed that the drowning victim was Brek Green, 25, of Cherokee County, Ga.
Cpl. Jared Wood, a local game warden with Georgia DNR, said the young man had been hanging out with a friend, also from out of town and swimming at the dock of the home when the drowning occurred around 2:30 a.m. Saturday=.
“One of his friends went inside and as he came back outside, he noticed his friend was missing,” Wood said. “After about 15 minutes of looking for him, that is when they called 911.”
Wood said DNR got the call to respond around 4 a.m., kicking off a roughly seven-hour search to find the missing man’s body.
Using boats equipped with side-scan sonar, DNR and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission made multiple sweeps through the cove before locating him on the bottom of the lake near the dock. A dive team attached to Towns County Fire & Rescue retrieved his body.
Additional information regarding the circumstances of the accident was not immediately available.
This is the second lake drowning tragedy investigated by DNR in the last month; a 5-year-old boy vacationing with his family at a rental property off Sunnyside Road drowned July 15 after wandering off.
“We’ve had an increase in boating activity and visitor activity and these
kinds of things happen in waves, it seems like, sometimes,” Wood said. “There’s no rhyme or reason why it happens – just total accidents.”