Patrick Hedican and his friends were playing volleyball at Carver Lake around 4:30 p.m. Saturday when word spread that a boy was missing in the water.

Everyone on the beach rushed to help look for the missing child, who later died at Regions Hospital.

Hedican, 28, of St. Paul, says he didn’t see anyone on the water’s surface struggling or panicking, so he began looking under the water.

“My buddy Chris, who is an ex-Marine, and me dove in right away. We didn’t see anything. We dove three times and kept going deeper,” he said. They and three other friends swam out past the buoys marking the swimming area and began to search under water.

At one point, people yelled for everyone to get out of the water and form a human chain to search for the child, but Hedican and his friends decided to keep searching. They knew there was no time to spare.

“I thought, this kid only has a few minutes to live,” Hedican said.

But, at first, they couldn’t find the boy. On each dive, Hedican said he’d try to go deeper.

“I’d been looking for about three to four minutes and me and my group of friends decided to dive in separate directions.”

On Hedican’s third dive, he made it down to the bottom of the lake. He had run out of breath, but when he looked up he saw the boy floating at the top of the seaweed above him. He was down about 25 feet in the water, he says.

“I can’t usually dive like that; I was going on adrenaline.”

He stretched his arm up but even though he’s 6 foot 4, he couldn’t reach the boy with his hand. Using the lake bottom to kick off for momentum, he swam upward, pushing the boy to the surface with him. Once he hit the air, he pulled the boy onto his chest and paddled back to the shore on his back, which was some 25 to 30 feet away.

“He was able to fit with his back on my chest, so I bear hugged him and started back to shore, kicking with my feet and using my arms to keep his head above the water,” he said.

When he got closer to the shore, exhaustion overcame him and he started to sink from his efforts to keep the boy’s head above water. A friend swimming to shore beside him, Sierra Sewell, grabbed the boy from Hedican and put him on a flotation device. Other bystanders pulled the flotation device toward shore and carried the boy to a grassy area where paramedics where waiting to perform CPR.

Without the boy on his chest, Hedican realized he was in water shallow enough to stand and did so. When he did he said he saw a line of people in uniforms standing on the shore watching: EMTs and police officers.

Hedican, a father to two small children, said he was angry that none of the police or medical personnel had rushed into the water to grab the boy when he got close to shore so emergency efforts could have been started earlier.

Michelle Okada, a spokeswoman for the Woodbury Police Department, said because the boy was already being carried to shore, having first responders “come out in the water to get them wouldn’t have saved any time.”

Okada did add that police were thankful for Hedican’s actions and the quick response from the beachgoers. She said the incident was emotional for everyone involved.

“Almost every single one of those responders — police, fire, EMS — almost every one of them have children, so they appreciate the high emotions that come with those situations and it does seem like time goes slower in those situations.”

Hedican stood by his belief that first responders could have done more to get the boy out of the water faster.

“I just want people to pray for the boy’s family,” he said. “I don’t think I’m a hero. I just acted on what I felt. I watched people who were trained not do a thing until we brought him to them. The kid had minutes to live. Every minute counted. … At least get your knees and boots wet. Make an effort. I get out of the water and all of you are dry. He was just a baby, a 5-year-old. They all just stood and watched.”

“Where I’m standing, it was wrong.”

Several other people expressed similar sentiments in Facebook posts on Sunday evening.

“Everybody that was here just hopped in, clothes on, didn’t matter. We just wanted that little boy to be safe,” one woman wrote. “Everybody EXCEPT the police And whoever said that the officer ‘coordinated’ the human chain is WRONG. We formed it before the police even got there. They arrived and stood at the shore for several minutes and looked LOST, like a deer in head lights, looking to every day citizens to save this little boy.”

Another said:

“Today I witnessed several officers and EMT’s sit back and do absolutely nothing as a 5 year old boy was drowning in Carver Lake. They sat at the shores and watched as the rest of us were in that lake looking for him. After 10 minutes of us looking for him someone finally pulled the child up from the water. An innocent, lifeless little boy who was under water for over 10 minutes. And not one person with a uniform was in the water.”

Despite efforts to revive the boy on shore, he was unresponsive and taken to Regions Hospital where he died, according to a statement by Woodbury’s Public Safety office:

“We are very sad to report that the 5-year-old boy, identified as Kendrick Jordan, Jr. of St. Paul Park who went missing yesterday at Carver Lake Park, has died. It is still unclear how long the boy was missing and under water. The Ramsey County Medical Examiner will do a full autopsy.”

Hedican said the boy’s mother called him Saturday night to let him know that the boy had died.

“I was watching a little boy die in my arms in front of people trained to save a life,” Hedican said. “All I’m saying is that if they would have met me halfway that boy would have had two or three more minutes to maybe live. I’ve been crying for two days straight and I’m not an emotional person.”

Officials say that every effort to save the boy was made and that nothing could have been done to lead to a different outcome.

“Based on the timeframe, the timing from when the first officer arrived, even if he was trained to do water rescue, it wouldn’t have been productive for him to jump right in the water,” Okada said.

From the time the first officer pulled up to the time the boy was found was less than three minutes, she said.

“Keeping that timeframe in mind for an officer to jump in the water not knowing wouldn’t be the best use of that time. What officers were doing as they arrived on scene were gathering information from multiple people on what was going on and deciding where to focus their efforts.”

Based on dispatch audio, dashcam video and other audio and visual taken at the beach, it was unclear if the boy was definitely in the water or possibly in a park bathroom or one of the two playgrounds, she said.

Okada said that dispatch shows that CPR was started less than a minute from when officers discovered the boy had been found.

“At 4:47 they hollered ‘We found him.’ By 4:48, medics were on scene directing CPR,” she said.

“By the time they found the body it was less than a minute before CPR was started. As you can imagine it would seem like forever.”

According to police scanner traffic on PoliceClips, an officer on scene says, “They’ve reported that they’ve got him in the water, they’re pulling him up, we need medics down at the beach now.”

A GoFundMe funeral fund has been set up for Kendrik Jordan Jr. By Sunday evening more than half of the $5,000 request had been donated.