It happened a couple of minutes at a time, a chain of events that ended with a mother and daughter nearly drowning at the bottom of Summit Lake on the Fourth of July.
A couple of minutes after 6 p.m. Monday, Dee’Andra C. McGhee, 29, of Akron, sat behind the wheel of a 2007 silver Chevrolet Cobalt that police say she didn’t own with a 2-year-old daughter whose custody she didn’t have.
The mother — who Akron police later said has a history of psychiatric issues — sat at the top of a grassy hill with the engine running. For a couple of minutes, she faced the car toward the lake below. She did not turn the wheel as it accelerated downward.
Two minutes before that, Amanda Teter smoked a cigarette outside an apartment across the street in the 1500 block of Manchester Road. She was there visiting a friend when McGhee drove deliberately and slowly around the area. The car disappeared behind a row of trees.
Teter, 29, had been waiting on a ride, which was already a couple of minutes late. She wasn’t supposed to be there. Having lived at the apartment complex before, she’d seen people drive down to the water’s edge to fish and didn’t think much of it.
Just then, Jeffrey Gasser and Eric Pearce, both 29, unexpectedly spotted their friend Teter while driving by. Gasser had just returned from a camping trip in Pennsylvania and needed a place to pull over to tighten a rope around some fishing rods in the bed of his truck.
He noticed the loose rods when police pulled him over a couple of minutes earlier. They let him go with a warning after Pearce admitted to tossing a candy wrapper out a passenger window.
The officer held them for a couple of minutes. “A couple more seconds, and everything would have changed,” Gasser said.
At 6:05 p.m., Gary Campbell sat in his living room, enjoying the view of Summit Lake out a back window.
“Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw a silver streak come across the yard,” said Campbell, 29. “When I pulled back the curtain, I saw the car going off the shore into the water.”
If the car had gone any slower, said Campbell, who sometimes fishes in the lake where he swam as a child, the vehicle would have lodged in the muck. But the car instead drifted out over deep water.
Campbell called 911 and began unloading his pockets, preparing to dash for the lake, when he saw Pearce leap into the muddy water. Five seconds and a few feet behind, Gasser followed.
Teter stood near the shore, watching as McGhee, the driver, turned “without much feeling in her face.” A little girl’s braided hair flicked in the backseat.
“I saw those beads,” said Teter, who screamed frantically: “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Teter said the mother had time to open the door as the car drifted. But she started panicking after it was too late.
Air bubbles popped where the car disappeared. The men took a deep breath and dived for the door latches on either side.
McGhee and the baby came shooting out the driver’s side “like buoys,” said Gasser, who watched through the passenger side of the submerged vehicle. Pearce struggled to keep them both afloat as Gasser swam over the car toward them.
Gasser took the baby from her mother and swam safely ashore, where police and emergency vehicles came crashing down the hill within minutes. The baby was checked at Akron Children’s Hospital and later released back to her grandmother, who has custody of the child. The girl barely made a peep throughout the entire ordeal, witnesses said.
Neither did McGhee, who is facing charges of attempted murder, child endangerment and criminal damaging — felonies that will likely be handed to a county judge after the Akron woman is arraigned in municipal court Wednesday morning.
“[McGhee] didn’t say a word, from the time it started until she was treated and taken away by paramedics,” Teter said. “She acted like she was in another world, like she was in a haze.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.