We would like to pay respect to and remember Airman 1st Class Keigan Baker, our fellow service member, who passed away on March 19, 2020. We will always be grateful for your service and the sacrifice you made on behalf of our nation. The results of an Air Force inquiry show that a training swim test that killed a special tactics airman on March 19 was conducted without the traditional “buddy team” method that is frequently used for swims of this kind. Despite the fact that Airman 1st Class Keigan Baker was trying to swim 2,000 yards in St. Andrews Bay, Florida—a bay near Panama City—the investigation yielded no conclusions about the specific circumstances that contributed to his drowning death.
Contrarily, the standards of the combat diving course specify that each swimmer must finish these 2,000 yards of swimming paired with and linked to another swimmer of comparable ability. This was mentioned in the declaration. This is done to make sure that an individual swimmer does not get separated from another swimmer and encounter problems. It was not done in the particular instance at hand. Additionally, the evening before the swim, Baker had taken two non-prescription Unisom sleep aids. This was carried performed without first obtaining a qualified medical professional’s medical authorization. Both the diving class policy and Air Force norms were broken by doing this.
When the autopsy was conducted on him, it was found that the elements found in it were still in his blood, according to the report. In June 2018, Baker, a combat controller, enlisted in the Air Force. He was chosen to be a member of the Special Tactics Training Squadron at Hurlburt Field in Florida in January 2020.
At the time of his enrollment, Baker was 24 years old when he enlisted in the Air Force. Both his births and his upbringing were in Longview, Washington, and he completed his education and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Eastern Washington University. He was assigned to the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center, which is housed within the Naval Support Activity in Panama City, Florida, and is home to the Air Force Combat Dive School. He had only been there for a short while.
It is the responsibility of the dive school to teach students the advanced concepts of combat diving, the advanced principles of survival diving, and the official designation of the 350th Special Warfare Training Squadron, Detachment 1. Students who successfully finish the dive school must be able to swim 2,000 yards, or more than a mile, on the surface while donning equipment that mimics various combat scenarios.
This is done in order to evaluate each student’s swimming proficiency on an individual basis. Like his classmates, Baker wore a rubber AR-15, a personal flotation device, a dive tool, a mask, and a load-bearing vest that held two pounds of weights each to represent ammo magazines. Baker also had on a rubber AR-15.
The day Baker drowned was also the day he died, on the fourth day of his lesson. When he died, he was in the water. Throughout the first three days of the competition, Baker and his classmates participated in a variety of physically demanding tasks. They had to swim a thousand yards on the surface while wearing protective gear during one of these tournaments. The instructors were forced to postpone the start of this surface swim by three hours due to the forecasted fog.
The timetable stated that the race will begin on March 19 at six o’clock in the morning. According to Baker’s classmates, nothing unusual about him seemed to be going on, and he seemed to be in a good mood. What they did notice, though, was that he had been experiencing hip flexor pain exclusively for the last couple of weeks.
