GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — The boyfriend of a Gwinnett County mother killed in a freak accident at the beach last week says he’s still struggling to understand why it happened.
Russell Scott spent two years planning a future with the love of his life and in a split second, it was taken away by a strike of lightning.
“Something hit me. It knocked me out and I fell in the water,” he said.
The strike injured him and killed his girlfriend, Janika Williams-Gardner, on a family trip at Daytona Beach last Friday. %
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“She was everything. She was my everything,” he said. “We were in the process of looking for a house somewhere away from the city to just grow old together.”
The 33-year-old mother had taken Scott and her three children to Florida for a weekend getaway after the death of her mother in February. Friends say she was hoping the trip would take her children’s minds off of the loss.
“For her to go down and this happens to her, it’s just another blow to the family,” her pastor, Phillip Mosby, said.
Scott says the kids were off the beach at a hotel pool while he and Gardner were getting out of the water.
It was around 5 p.m. when he says a single bolt hit her while she was just 10 feet behind him.
“When I looked back, I could see her laying on the ground and they were doing CPR on her,” he said.
She fought as long as she could, but died hours later at a local hospital.
“How often is somebody electrocuted by lightning? You just don't hear about that,” Mosby said.
Mosby was Gardner’s pastor at Solomon Porch Ministries in DeKalb County. He says he’s now helping her children and relatives plan the funeral.
“That gives me comfort that Janika is in the arms of God now,” he said.
[ The family has created a GoFundMe page to help with funeral expenses. ]