NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - The Metro Nashville Police Department identified the man who disappeared on Percy Priest Lane on Saturday evening.
MNPD said the body of Harold L. Tomlinson, 34, was recovered from Percy Priest Lake near the dam and Nashville Shores at 8:25 a.m. on Sunday.
Tomlinson jumped into the water from a rented pontoon along with several children from the boat, according to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. He was not wearing a personal flotation device.
The TWRA said witnesses recounted Tomlinson started to drift away from the pontoon due to windy conditions and remembered hearing him call for the boat to come closer. The people on the boat were never able to locate him.
Search teams from TWRA, the Nashville Office of Emergency Management, and the Nashville Fire Department searched the lake until nightfall when conditions were no longer safe to do so.
The search resumed on Sunday morning. Bystanders found Tomlinson’s body near the Nashville Shores shoreline, according to the TWRA.
Jason Doornewerd goes for a walk around Percy Priest at least once a day. He said on Saturday he saw searchers and had a terrible feeling.
“They were doing the boat launch rescue units were coming out. And then we drove by right here at the dam and we’d seen the rescue boats going back and forth looking for a person,” Doornewerd said.
He says after hearing about the drowning he’s keeping an even closer eye on his children who enjoy swimming by the lake shore.
“I won’t be as quick to let them go out swimming in bad weather when it’s like this,” Doornewerd said.
The TWRA reported Tomlinson’s death was the first of the year at Percy Priest Lake and the third boating-related fatality on Tennessee waterways in 2024.
The incident remains under investigation.
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