Authorities say a New Jersey man died over the weekend after getting caught in a thunderstorm and struck by lightning on the beach. Police in Seaside Park tell NJ Advance Media that a 911 call came in shortly after 7:30pm on Sunday, and when first responders found 59-year-old Patrick Dispoto of Toms River lying unconscious on the beach, where a strong storm had swept through. Emergency staff transported Dispoto to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to police spokesman Sgt. Andrew Casole.
Dispoto suffered an "accidental death caused by lightning strike," Casole notes, per CNN, though no one witnessed the strike itself. Ruth Fussell, who identified herself as Dispoto's girlfriend, told police she and Dispoto had left Seaside Park Beach and returned to his truck when they realized a storm was rolling in—but she said her boyfriend returned to the beach solo to warn some kids who were still in the water about the weather. "I said, 'You have no business going back,'" Fussell recalls, per WABC. "And he says, 'I'm just going to warn these kids, because the sky is going to open."
Shortly after Dispoto left her in the truck, Fussell called him a few times, waiting about 15 minutes before heading onto the beach, where she and others found him unconscious. In a note of sad irony, News 12 reports that Seaside Park was in the process of installing a $50,000 lightning detection system for its 1.5-mile stretch of beach. "We don't want to tell people when the storm is here; we want to tell people that the storm is coming so that they can stay ahead of it," says a local lifeguard captain. According to the National Lightning Safety Council, Dispoto's death is the third lightning fatality in the United States this year. It's the first in the Garden State since 2021. (More lightning strike stories.)
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