Scarborough North State Beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island, was closed on the evening of July 18, 2023. No lifeguards were on duty.
Around 7 p.m., a 17-year-old boy went into the surf and began struggling to stay afloat. A rip current pulled at him faster than he could fight it.
A 20-year-old woman who had come to the beach with him saw the boy from the shoreline. She went in after him. Within moments, the current had her too.
Idmael Elmonus, 38, of Cranston, was elsewhere on the beach that evening. He did not know the boy. He did not know the woman.
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He watched two strangers go under the same water that had already taken the ground out from beneath both of them, and he went in.
There was no equipment beside him, no lifeguard tower, no flotation device within reach. There was a closed beach, a rip current, and a decision that took him past the point where he could still turn back.
Environmental police and Narragansett officers responded and got into the water themselves. They reached the boy and the woman first and brought both of them to shore.
Elmonus was still out past the break. Rescue swimmers got to him and pulled him aboard a Narragansett Fire Department boat, which carried him to the Point Judith boat ramp.
First responders worked on him during the transport and after. He was taken to South County Hospital with the boy and the woman he had gone in to save.
The boy and the woman were treated and released. Elmonus did not survive.
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management said afterward that Elmonus did not know either person he tried to reach. The agency's statement used the word selflessness. It did not need to use any other word.
A sergeant with the Environmental Police later said something plainer to a local reporter, a warning about people without water rescue training going in after someone and becoming a second victim themselves. It is the kind of caution that arrives too late for the man it was written about.
Elmonus left behind a family who spoke to reporters in the days after, remembering a man who did not hesitate when it mattered. What he did not leave behind was a plan for what happens to a family when the person who would have provided for them is the one who does not come back from the water.
That is the part of this story that has nothing to do with the ocean. A decision made in four seconds can outlast the man who made it by decades, in the finances and the future of the people he loved.
If going in meant you might not come back, and the person in the water was a stranger, would you still have gone?