Two off-duty lifeguards made the unpleasant discovery of a body believed to be a 24-year-old Jenkinson’s Boardwalk employee who went missing in the ocean over the weekend.
Cooper Richards and Robby Golebieski were walking along the beach in the Ocean Beach section of Toms River just before midnight Sunday when they found the body believed to be Zuzana Oravcova, who was reported in missing in Point Pleasant Beach earlier that day.
The young men say that they thought the body was seaweed at first.
“I thought I’d be able to handle something like that and then…right away I was like, ‘that’s something else,’” Richards says.
The guards say that they immediately called their beach supervisor when they realized it was a body.
“We flashed our flashlights on it and my first reaction was, ‘I think this is the body they’ve been searching for all day,’” says Golebieski.
Officials say that Oravcova, who worked at Jenkinson’s Boardwalk, jumped into the rough ocean water with a male companion around 2 a.m. Sunday. The companion was able to get out of the water, but Oravcova was swept away.
Lifeguards searched for Oravcova for the majority of Sunday, but no one was able to find her until the two off-duty guards stumbled upon her body.
Toms River beach manager Michael Barrett says that the tide almost pulled Oravcova’s body back into the ocean.
“They had just gotten there and two waves came up and she started to go back out, so we just grabbed her and pulled her in,” he says.
Police say that Oravcova’s death does not seem to be suspicious, and they are calling it a tragic accident.