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 News from Around Banderas Bay | August 2006 
Woman Seeks Husband’s Final Moments
 Jim Sabin - LimaOhio.com
| | If you were aboard and can shed any light on her husband’s final moments, Ruman can be reached at 219-838-6316 or rjdaboyz@sbcglobal.net. |
Highland, Ind. — Jennifer Ruman wants nothing more than to know how her husband died, and she thinks someone may have the answer.
Rich Ruman, 55, died aboard a snorkeling boat near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on June 25, of either a heart attack or drowning, but Jennifer Ruman has no idea which. There were others on the boat who gave conflicting reports to police and media, but one friend she made on the trip said her sister remembered meeting people from Lima, Ohio on the boat.
“It’s a lot of unanswered questions. I’m not blaming anyone for his death. I’d just love to speak to anybody who was on that boat,” Ruman said Friday from her home in Indiana.
The day had gone well to that point. The family boarded the tour boat several hours earlier and went out to go snorkeling and scuba diving, and the boat had stopped off at a private beach, Ruman said. Passengers were invited to swim ashore or wait for a water taxi.
Two of the couples’ children, Stephanie, 15, and Nick, 13, took a banana boat ride ashore, and Rich and Jennifer both jumped in to swim ashore. The current made it difficult, though, and Rich turned back, easily reaching the boat. When Jennifer tried, the current had shifted again, and she found it far easier to get to shore.
She saw her husband on the boat’s platform. That was the last time she saw him alive.
What happened next is what’s haunting her. A man came ashore to tell her there’d been an incident with her husband, but wouldn’t say what it was. She tried to wait for the water taxi to take her back to the boat, but other passengers were moving slowly and she heard he was no longer on board. After flagging down a taxi cab and then a police officer, she finally heard the worst — her husband was dead.
“I said, ‘Are you telling me my husband’s dead?’ And he reached his arm back and said, ‘yeah,’” Ruman said, recounting her conversation with a police officer.
A Spanish-language newspaper account quoted witnesses as saying Rich Ruman couldn’t breathe when he was on the boat, then fell or jumped into the water. Another said he went into a convulsion and was still breathing when he hit the water. When he was brought back aboard, crew members tried CPR, to no avail, the witnesses said.
But the boat’s captain reported that he saw Ruman floating face-up in the water and ordered crew members in to retrieve him.
Rich Ruman had heart problems and also had a bad knee, Jennifer said. He had a gash on his head, indicating he might have fallen and hit his head before drowning, or he could have had a heart attack. But she hopes that whatever happened was fast; the thought of her husband fighting a heart attack and looking for her haunts her, she said.
“I should have been there. I should have gotten back to the boat,” she said. “Then I would know. My fear is that he was having a heart attack and was looking for me, and he was in the middle of the ocean with no one he knew, and that was his last moment. That is the image I can’t get out of my head.”
Ruman said she’s been working with the American consulate in Mexico to try to get more answers. A woman at the consulate confirmed Friday that she’d been working with Ruman, but said any comments must come from her boss, who was unavailable Friday.
Ruman said she just wants to know the truth.
Ruman said the snorkeling boat was owned by Geronimo Tours and sailed on June 25. If you were aboard and can shed any light on her husband’s final moments, Ruman can be reached at 219-838-6316 or rjdaboyz@sbcglobal.net.
jsabin@limanews.com |
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