Fundraising effort aids ex-USC swimmer severely injured in Newport ocean accident

Spending time with friends at a house near the Balboa Pier last month, Dillon Connolly decided to join the group for a swim.

He ran toward the shoreline and dove into the waves, like any other day.

The 25-year-old had been swimming his whole life. He qualified for the Olympic Trials during high school in Marietta, Ga. He broke two USC records in the breaststroke and was the college team’s captain his senior year.

But on Sept. 13, as his body slid through the water, something was different. Where he expected the ocean floor to slope downward, Connolly instead hit a shallow sandbar, perhaps caused by recent hurricane-generated swells.

He couldn’t feel his body. His neck and spinal cord were injured. He floated face down in the waves, holding his breath and hoping one of the friends who was with him had seen the accident.

Connolly had moved to Newport Beach after graduating from college in 2011. He still swam often, a passion he balanced with his work as an engineer at Pacific Precision Products in Irvine.

He was active, perhaps running or biking if he wasn’t swimming. He thought he might go to the Olympics someday.

But as friends helped him from the water and an ambulance took him to Hoag Hospital, the dream became deferred.

Connolly has begun getting some feeling back in his arms, said his housemate and friend James Kashyap, 22. But doctors say it is still too early to know how Connolly will recover.

Kashyap started a Go Fund Me page, https://www.gofundme.com/DillonConnolly, to raise money for Connolly’s medical expenses, which included his transfer this week to a recovery facility in Atlanta.

As of Friday afternoon, the effort had raised nearly $44,000 from 324 donations.

“This is just so hard for me to comprehend, the actual outcome of it,” said Connolly’s friend Camille Murray, 25. “Because you think of someone who has been so self-sufficient and active and involved in [your] life and all of a sudden they have to be taken care of every day and they can’t move. Their whole life is different.”