While out for the fourth of July weekend to celebrate a birthday, 31-year-old Teegan Hill and 28-year-old Troinee Broom both fell from a chartered pontoon boat that they were on, sending them into Lewisville Lake. According to NBC, the sisters never surfaced again after their fall, which occurred around 8 PM on Sunday, July 4.
Search crews reportedly located and recovered their bodies around four to five hours later. Denton County, Texas Game Wardens, who are investigating the incident, confirmed two drownings in the lake that same night, according to Fox 4 in Dallas.
According to NBC, Hill and Broom were on a boat that they chartered together to celebrate the older sister’s 31st birthday on Sunday. They reportedly brought along friends as they took a trip out on Lewisville Lake, located in north Texas and spanning nearly 30,000 acres.
But after leaving on the boat at around 4 PM, the passengers began to experience turbulent water and heavy waves. A witness told NBC. A friend on the boat and witness, Darius Jones, told the outlet that a third wave hit the boat when they were finishing their trip, causing the sisters to fall overboard, saying, “That one was massive, and the boat was going under, like, the first two didn’t compare at all to the third one.”
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He also told NBC that 11 passengers and a captain were on the boat because they were told that only 12 people could be on at once. Jones also said that he tried to swim to where Hill and Broom had fallen, but they were underneath the water by the time he could make it there.
Hill is remembered as an accomplished track star for Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she ran as a sprinter starting in 2009. According to the Tennessean, she later earned a law degree from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law and has worked as a trial attorney and associate attorney. Broom reportedly worked as a school teacher in Dallas, Texas, before Sunday’s tragic events.
Our thoughts are with their family, friends and loved ones as they process this tragic loss.
