An Ohio State University student died of a broken neck after jumping into Mirror Lake.
The annual Mirror Lake jump by students into the icy waters ended tragically this year when Austin Singletary died.
Another student found him submerged in the water. Emergency crews tried to save Singletary but he later died at the hospital.
Franklin County Coroner Anahi Ortiz said preliminary results showed the 22-year-old from Dayton suffered a fracture of his C-5 vertebra, in the neck area, during the plunge. She said additional testing is needed to make a final determination.
“I think it's awful, people should have been paying better attention like if they saw him struggling, they should have said something,” freshman Jon Bray said.
Singletary was also involved in a university group called Social Change that focused on programming for people facing poverty.
Bray experienced Mirror Lake for the first time and left with a bad feeling about the decades old tradition.
“It was fun but I probably won't do it again because it was just a bad idea, it was really cold,” he said.
And Bray won't get a chance to do it again.
The event is not sanctioned by the university but OSU has gone to great lengths to try to make it safe, putting up fencing to have just one entry point, giving out wristbands to make sure only students participate and having police and paramedics all around.
With this year's horrible outcome, OSU says it will put an end to the jump.
“That's probably a good idea,” Bray said.
Still, this is something many students look forward to every year in the week leading up to the big rivalry game against Michigan.
“I love coming out with friends, it’s kind of a quirky thing,” sophomore Wiatt Hamlin said.
But seeing the chaos this year as the students were cleared out and the dive teams moved in is enough for many to say, maybe this tradition has run its course.
“As good of a tradition as it is, it's not worth people's lives to keep it going,” freshman Bob Murcko said.