NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF — A family is mourning a loving wife and mother of three after they say she drowned in Percy Priest Lake.
Martin Ambrosio tells me it all started when his 12-year-old daughter was struggling to swim in the lake Sunday. He says he was out swimming in another part of the lake, so her mother jumped in to help.
"I asked, where is your mom, where is your mom? [His daughter] said she went into the water already," recalled Ambrosio.
He realized it wasn't his daughter in danger anymore: it was his wife, Amarilia Vamaca, better known in the family as Lileana.
Nashville Fire says they got a 911 call looking for someone in the lake. Martin says after half a dozen people went searching, they found her.
"A boy brought her out, but she had already passed away," said Ambrosio.
Fire officials said bystanders did CPR until medics arrived and brought her to the hospital. Her family says she was taken off of life support later that week.
She was the mother of three young children and Martin's whole world for 15 years.
"We're sad," Ambrosio said. "She was an open person, smiling, happy, a joker, she liked to be friends with people..."
He says while they are still struggling to navigate life without her, he hopes God can be a guiding force.
"We hope in the name of God that God will give us the strength to be able to overcome it, to be able to move forward," he said.
He also hopes safety measures can be taken to protect the Spanish speaking community.
"We don't know how to read English [and] we didn't see any signs," he explained, noting it would be beneficial to have clear signs of dangerous parts of the lake in English and Spanish.
If you want to help with expenses to bring Amarilia's body back to Guatemala, where she was from, you can visit the GoFundMe.
Quotes in this article were translated from Spanish to English.
Do you have more information about this story? You can email me at nikki.hauser@newschannel5.com.
My friend and colleague Carrie Sharp had a lot of fun last week, on an adventure to a country more than three thousand miles away! She’s back now – sharing her Adventures in Iceland through stories, and incredible images of this remarkably beautiful and unique island nation (kudos to Chief Photographer Catherine Steward)! But did you know Nashville has something very important in common with Iceland? Tourism! Here, Carrie explains how a volcanic eruption decades ago helped save the country’s economy from collapse!
-Rhori Johnston
