The dive instructor who was teaching 12-year-old Dylan Harrison and other children on the day of her death has resigned from his position in the local sheriff’s office.
According to the local Fox News TV affiliate which first broke the story, Assistant Chief Deputy William Armstrong resigned from the Collin County Sheriff’s Office on October 21st, effective immediately.
A lawyer helping the Harrison family told the news outlet that no information from Armstrong’s dive computer or divemaster Jonathan Roussel was readily available, hampering efforts to find out exactly what happened during the fateful dive.
The attorney, David Concannon, said:
“That’s a black box that’ll show you a tremendous amount of information about what happened to Dylan … It’s unusual. That so many people who know what to do were present, and things that weren’t done.”
Last August, Harrison was participating in a training course at the Scuba Ranch in Terrell, Texas administered by Armstrong, who was working for the Scuba Toys dive shop.
The Scuba Ranch subsequently suspended Armstrong from teaching at the facility along with the Scuba Toys dive shop.
The story first came to light last week when the Fox outlet broadcast a video showing the owner of the Scuba Toys dive shop apparently admitting this may not have been the first death the shop was allegedly involved in.
The video shows a standards meeting held in 2017, where Joe Johnson, owner of the Scuba Toys dive shop, says in response to an instructor’s comment about not taking lawsuits lightly:
“All I know is we’ve killed, what, four people, five people and we’ve never even done a deposition. Our insurance company just settles. John Witherspoon said we can kill two people a year, we fine.”
Johnson’s 2017 reply led to that instructor quitting the dive shop and sending the video to a local official at the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI).
According to the Fox News affiliate, that official, John Banks, a former NAUI regional director, forwarded the video on to the organization’s then-head of training and standards and subsequently the then-CEO of NAUI.
