Grieving father fights invisible killer: Electrical shock to swimmers

This article is a follow up to last week's newsletter: 3 Children Electrocuted in Tenn., Mo.

By Isolde Raftery, msnbc.com

When Kevin Ritz read about the children who died after being shocked by electricity while swimming in lakes in Missouri and Tennessee on Wednesday, he thought about his 8-year-old son, Lucas, and the dozens of others who have died this way.

"Everyone goes, 'How can that happen?'" Ritz said.

In 1999, Ritz's children were swimming in the Multnomah Channel of the Willamette River in Oregon when suddenly, Lucas let out a gasp and apparently became unconscious. His life jacket flipped him over so that his face was out of the water. As his wife jumped in the water to save their son, she felt paralyzed, a feeling she attributed to fear. His other son later reported that he, too, felt numb and tingly.

Law enforcement officers told Ritz that his son had drowned, but Ritz pushed them to investigate further. His son's face, he said, hadn't been submerged and he had been wearing a life jacket.

"With my digital voltmeter, I went to the area where Lucas had been, put the negative lead to a ground, dropped the positive lead into the water, and immediately got AC voltage," he wrote in an essay about his son's death. "I notified the Sheriff's Department, reporting what I had found and that I wanted to get someone to confirm my test. They agreed to send out some deputies while I called in an electrician. He arrived later that morning, tracing the electricity to a powerboat that was in the area where the kids had been swimming."

In the throes of grief, Ritz, now a marine electrician, started agitating for safer marinas. It infuriated him, for example, that electrical outlets at marinas were not held to the same standards as outlets in bathrooms.

"The European market has had ground fault protection in their marinas - the power coming into the marina at the docks - for over 25 years," Ritz told msnbc.com. "How come we can"t have that?"

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