The Windsor man who says he swam across the Detroit River earlier this week is deeply regretting his stunt — while insisting that he did the deed.
“I know what I did. It really doesn’t matter to me what anybody else says,” 47-year-old John Morillo said Wednesday. “That’s the least of my problems.”
Morillo’s tale of swimming from Windsor to Detroit and back again has been attracting plenty of attention. News outlets on both sides of the border have been carrying the story — from CBS News, CBC’s The National and the Globe and Mail to the Huffington Post, MSN.com and the New York Daily News.com. He’s scheduled to be interviewed on Detroit radio Thursday morning.
But there are those who question Morillo’s claim.
Tecumseh resident Andrew Vendrasco, a 33-year-old triathlete, said he and fellow swimmers have been talking about the stunt and the consensus is that it’s “unlikely” Morillo did it.
The problem is the return trip. “Coming back would be an extremely difficult task, even for competitive swimmers,” Vendrasco said.
According to Morillo, he began his feat from Windsor’s riverfront near the Hiram Walker property. A neighbour held his shirt and sandals while he entered the water wearing gym shorts.
Morillo’s not sure how long it took him to arrive at the Renaissance Center on the Detroit side.
From there, Morillo said he crossed the river again to end up at the shoreline in front of Hilton Windsor — about a mile across. Morillo said he didn’t feel particularly tired.
“If I start making it sound easy, it’s going to make me look worse,” Morillo said. “The water was smooth as glass, and it was warm.”
But Vendrasco feels that the current — which moves from east to west — should have put Morillo much farther downriver on his return trip. Especially for someone who doesn’t swim regularly.
“I mean, it’s possible. Everybody has different capacities. But it’d be a big task,” said Vendrasco, who swims in Lake St. Clair five days a week.
For his part, Morillo said on Wednesday that he doesn’t care about the disbelievers. Anyone who doubts can look at the video evidence.
“You can find people who were taking my photograph at the Renaissance Center,” Morillo said. “They were asking to take their picture with me.”
Morillo said he has no background in competitive swimming, and the extent of his swimming in recent years has been splashing in backyard pools.
Asked what stroke he used for his cross-border swim, Morillo replied: “You know, one hand after the other. I don’t know what the hell you call it. There was no crawl, no backstroke, none of this fancy stuff. I just swam…. I’m laying face down, and using one arm at a time, and kicking at the same time.”
However, Morillo described himself as a “strong swimmer,” and said he keeps in shape with bicycling. He said that he twice cycled from Windsor to Sudbury when he was in his 20′s, and did a lot of recreational swimming around Point Pelee when he was younger.
“I was totally confident I would make it,” Morillo said.
As for the eight beers Morillo consumed before Monday night’s adventure, he said he drank them throughout the day, and he wasn’t inebriated by the time he was in the water.
“Everybody is making it sound like I was wasted, and I was not,” Morillo said. “I’m sure I was sober when I got back.”
Meanwhile, Windsor Port Authority harbour master Peter Berry said the incident remains under investigation, and wouldn’t comment on the veracity of Morillo’s claim.
Instead, Berry emphasized the dangers of the Detroit River. He said it’s about 40 feet down at its deepest point, which was dredged in the 1980s to clear a channel for ship traffic.
“What the channel does, of course, is create an undertow,” Berry said. “You get sucked to the bottom of the river, then you get dragged.”
Berry said the river’s surface current ranges from two to five knots — or 3.7 to 9.2 km/h, depending on the wind.
Underneath that is the bottom current, which is double the surface current’s strength.
And the bottom of the river is far from clean. “Think of centuries of use,” Berry said. “This used to be the garbage dump for both sides of the river. Think of the things that could be down there.”
“There’s cars, parts of ships, cargo that has fallen off of ships, buildings that have collapsed, piers that have collapsed.”
Berry said Morillo’s story could have had a tragic ending. “There’s a lot of things that could go wrong, entering the Detroit River…. It’s a major shipping lane with a fast-moving current.”
Morillo doesn’t disagree with Berry’s warnings.
“Oh God, he was so mad at me. I thought he was going to punch me in the face,” Morillo said. “He came when I was in the paddy wagon…. He said, ‘I could throw the book at you, you stupid bastard.’ And I don’t blame him.”
Morillo said that while he was being arrested on the Windsor side, he noticed a large freighter moving in the water where he’d been.
“That would have killed me for sure,” Morillo said. “It was very stupid. Please, please tell everybody: ‘Don’t do it. Bad idea.’”
A history of border swimmers
John Morillo isn’t the first person to get into trouble for swimming across the Detroit River — or at least trying to do so.
In the middle of the day on July 6, 2006, the U.S. Coast Guard apprehended an American citizen in the water just west of the Ambassador Bridge.
U.S. Coast Guard apprehend a man just west of the Ambassador Bridge in this July 2006 file photo. (Jason Kryk / The Windsor Star)
The swimmer — a 44-year-old man from West Virginia — was struggling against the current, but refused several attempts to be rescued.
Coast guard members finally pulled the man into a boat by force about 30 metres from the Windsor side of the river.
The man was handed over to Windsor police, and then the Canada Border Services Agency, who released him back to the U.S.
Another border swimmer wasn’t so fortunate.
On Sept. 2, 1994, an unidentified man’s decomposed body was discovered at the river’s edge in Windsor’s west end, near Russell Street.
The man appeared to be of Middle Eastern ethnicity.
On his person were a forged passport, an international address book, and $1,200 in U.S. and Canadian cash — all carefully sealed in plastic.
What was left of the man’s fingerprints failed to turn up matches in databases.
Investigators believed the man tried to swim across the river, but something went wrong. The body had a dislocated shoulder.
“We don’t know which way he was trying to go, but one assumption is he was trying to get to the United States,” a Windsor police spokesman said at the time.
Patrol boats are shown on the Detroit River in this April 16, 1932 archive photo. (The Windsor Star)
