Inside the investigation into Cheatham Lake crash that killed a father and son
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect Blake Brainard's age, according to his obituary.
There were no witnesses around when the Sea-Doo carrying 36-year-old Steven White and his 8-year-old son Blake Brainard crashed with a commercial barge on Cheatham Lake Saturday night, a Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officer recounted Monday.
Employees aboard the barge were able to pull White from the water shortly after the crash, but he did not survive. His son was initially lost in the water, triggering a search that would end in tragedy almost 24 hours later.
No one said they saw what led up to the crash. No one, "ever made themselves known to us,” TWRA Wildlife Officer Matt Norman said.
“The only witnesses that we interviewed were the ones that were actually on the barge itself,” he said. “We never had anybody else from the shore or anything like that, that came forward (saying) they had seen anything.”
The father and son struck the barge around 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Search crews did not recover the missing boy's body until 6:40 p.m. on Sunday.
How the search for a missing boy unfolded
The initial search for the missing child ended around 1 a.m. Sunday. Cheatham County deputies and TWRA officers stayed on site until search efforts resumed at 8 a.m.
Police efforts were staged near where the incident occurred on Cheatham Lake and a boat ramp that connected to Lock A Campground on Cheatham Dam Road in Ashland City.
“The scene was busy but very organized, and everybody from multiple agencies was working together to try to get a resolution as fast as possible,” Norman said.
Officials from the TWRA, United States Coast Guard, Metro Nashville Police, Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office, Tennessee Highway Patrol and other agencies joined in the search for the missing child, who as of Monday night had not been publicly identified by authorities.
“When our officers initially got on scene, we (started) using a piece of equipment called a side scan, and basically, that is a piece of equipment on a boat that puts pulses down into the water. (It's) a way to detect down into the water, that can show us what’s on the bottom of a particular body of water,” Norman said.
“It’s kind of limited in scale, kind of around the boat, itself, so that can be used to see what’s going on directly below the boat and the surrounding areas of the boat.”
Bolstering search efforts
Because of the limited visibility of the side scan device, emergency crews also conducted visual searches, deploying Tennessee Highway Patrol and Metro Nashville Police helicopters.
“Once those initial searches failed to find anything, we had a specialized piece of equipment that (came in after),” Norman said. It was a remote operated vehicle (ROV).
“You can think of it as a submersible, and it has a sonar system as well as a camera system on it, and basically, we can use that to search larger areas under the water while keeping a person safe on our vessel,” he said.
Officials utilized the ROV to search under 13 barges that were involved in the crash. Several cadaver dogs were also brought on board to aid in the search.
“Our main focus entirely was on locating that child. Now that that child’s been located, we can start going back and really start processing a lot of the evidence and information we were given… now’s when we’ll really start digging in and trying to go over everything that we’ve collected and start piecing things back together,” Norman said.
Tennessee boating deaths, accidents
Even though White and his son were both wearing life jackets at the time of the crash, that act alone did not prevent their deaths.
“The collision definitely caused the deaths, but as far as what the autopsy would reveal, I wouldn’t be able to speak on that,” Norman said, noting that the subsequent investigation will ultimately reveal what happened on the water Saturday.
"At least that’s the hope," he said. "Barges are commercial vehicles, and as such, they do have camera systems onboard. We just aren’t able to get access to those right now, but those will be available to us during the investigation.”
The Saturday incident brings Tennessee's boating fatalities to 22 so far this year, the TWRA said.
The number of recreational boating fatalities for all of 2022 was 29, according to figures cited in the 2022 Tennessee Boating Incident Statistical Report Executive Summary.
Forty-eight boating-related accidents have been reported so far this year on Tennessee waters, resulting in 66 injuries. That's up from 42 injury incidents in 2022.
The leading contributing cause of boating-related injuries in 2022 was careless and reckless operation, according to the report. Collision with another vessel resulted in the most injuries, occurring 21 times last year.
Only one fatal incident involving a personal watercraft was reported in 2022.
The Saturday incident on Cheatham Lake remains under investigation. Katie Nixon can be reached at knixon@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: What we know about fatal Tennessee barge crash on Cheatham Lake
