Pagakis recalled the event: “She had her wedding dress on and she said, ‘take some pictures of me while I swim a little bit in the lake,’ she went in and her dress got heavy, I tried everything I could to save her.”
The photographer said, “I jumped in, I was screaming and yelling, we tried our best.”
The Toronto Sun reports that the bride’s tragic last words to the photographer were, “I can’t anymore, it’s too heavy.”
The bride’s body was eventually found almost four hours after the tragedy, which started at around 2:00 PM.
Another photographer, Mario Michaud, came out after the tragedy to disclose that a bride he was photographing had almost met a similar end months earlier at the same location.
According to a story at the time from CTV Montreal. Maria’s family subsequently issued a statement urging the implementation of more robust safety protocols, according to the Daily Mail.
