A 37-year-old woman training to become a firefighting by swimming at night has gone missing from Dog Beach, her mother says, as reported by 10News. Amy D’Angelo texted her mom, Becky Obayashi, Wednesday night that she was going swimming at Dog Beach.
She took an Uber to Dog Beach with her black lab Charlie the night before Thanksgiving. The next day, Becky says police only found only Charlie and her sweatpants waiting at the shore. “He was half in the water at the shore, looking at the ocean,” Obayashi said of D’Angelo’s dog, Charlie.
Amy is also married and the mother of three. Obayashi told ABC 10News:
“She’s been swimming at night at the beach with her dog Charlie for quite a while. We’re of course devastated, especially the uncertainty.”
10News reports:
Obayashi says she hasn’t been able to get information from Uber about the ride, but her trip to Dog Beach was typical. D’Angelo was a former personal trainer, who had been swimming and training to become a firefighter.
Obayashi filed a report with the police.
A spokesperson for the San Diego Police Department says at this point there’s nothing it can publicly report. One of D’Angelo’s close friends says they were able to track her iPhone to Dog Beach. But the family and friends haven’t found the phone, which now goes straight to voicemail.
Sometimes you read a story and it just doesn’t sound right. Why would anyone train to be a fire fighter by swimming in the ocean at night? Makes no sense. I recognize the woman because I walk my dogs there every morning. I hope they find her ok. The dog’s reaction is a bad sign I’m afraid.
San Diego Lifeguards are currently a division of the Fire-Rescue Department. So, not if she’s a heavy-duty swimmer.
Right…
Channel 10 totally screwed their story and headline up. They focused on that she’s a “mom” in the headline and hinted that she just may have “run away.”
What? Really? She was swimming in the ocean alone at NIGHT making lots of splashy noises and jerky movements in the water that are so attractive to certain hungry species?
Gaaaaa! It’s not as if the Pacific is just one big swimming pool! How ignorant do you have to be to do this alone? She’s never heard of the buddy system that all divers (and other ocean users) are well aware of?
People who have no idea how an ocean ecosystem works have no business being in it. Big sigh.
There ARE many predators just waiting for a nice juicy meal to come by making all sorts of ruckus on the ocean surface in the freaking dark. With a bright moon overhead shining down through the surface which is very good at outlining what’s up on top to those underneath.
Or she may be bumping along on the ocean’s bottom being rolled around by currents but eventually the body will bloat and surface to be washed in like the woman I found on Southside of OB Pier early one morning in 1986 wrapped in kelp after she fell off the Pier a few nights earlier while sitting on the railing in front of her kids. You know, the railing with DO NOT SIT ON THE RAILING stamped on it every few feet? Or she may get caught in a current and end up way the hell out. Ocean critters need fed, too, ya know?
Or maybe a cramp in the leg got her. Or a boat propeller. Or a piece of wood in a wave that broke on her head in the dark she didn’t see coming which conked her.
sealintheSelkirks
Wow, seal. I’m all for blunt talking but this comment was a little rough, even for me.
Yeah, probably, and when I read this sad story the memory of the woman I grabbed hold of in 1986 came right to the forefront of my brain with a WTF attached to it. That memory wasn’t the only experience with finding people, either. Those faces stay in the back of your head…and are triggered now and then. This was one of those moments.
As another long-time surfer well-adapted to the requirements of being in the ocean SAFELY, did you ever do something like this? I didn’t, never surfed at night because it was a completely unsafe thing to do much less swim out to sea in a river mouth which, as all surfers should know, is a very likely place for meat eaters to hang out in front of waiting for meals. Look at the shark hit statistics in Australia…at or near rivermouths are a pretty big chunk.
And to be even more blunt, have you ever had to unwrap a dead woman from a mass of seaweed around her legs & body while trying not to let her go and get lost again? It’s a memory I’d rather not have…so I put it in my book Massacre Sites; Working for the Dead hoping I could just leave it there.
Nope, it came back today. I sent Frank a copy, you might borrow it from him and read that little part?
It wasn’t meant in the spirit of mean-ness, just as a brutal warning to those who don’t pay any respect to the ocean and think it’s just their safe little playground without understanding the complexity, and rules, of the life in it. It’s like the pictures of the idiots crowding around the mammals at La Jolla Cove to take ‘selfies’ that pop up every once in a while online. Admit it, you probably are thinking ‘what are these people thinking?’ as much as I do!
sealintheSelkirks
I said your second paragraph to someone today. But, you have to know the ocean and that comes from years of getting wet. I started as a toddler in Hawaii and have only left the ocean for one ill-conceived stint in central Michigan for college. You also have that long experience. It makes me wonder, how could we warn people not to go swimming at night, alone, at the river mouth? Just like the sad story of a grandfather and his granddaughter being swept into the sea by sleeper wave in San Francisco, we just can’t make the world safe for everyone in the ocean.
No, I have never had the unpleasant experience of finding a dead body and hope I never will.
And, I know you did not make your comments in any spirit of meanness. I just cringed a little wondering how the lady’s family might feel reading your somewhat detailed descriptions of a few things.
I hope the woman’s family doesn’t have the misfortune of reading your gross and totally inappropriate comments. In the future you should keep your cruel thoughts to yourself. We are all worse off than we were 5min ago after reading your heartless drivel.
I don’t believe it was his intent to be cruel or heartless, if you have read seal’s past comments you would know that is not the kind of person he is.
The intent of the post is irrelevant.
Of course it is. The post was either meant to be mean on purpose or it was not. Knowing something about the poster, my take is that it was not meant to be mean. All of us who write anything make perhaps poor judgements when it comes to wording or timing with no intention of being hurtful. It is how a reader interprets something and that interpretation can also be wrong.
You really could have stopped at “of course it is.”
Well, there you go, perhaps badly worded with the expectation that a reader would make the connection to your comment. I should know better. I have learned a writer should not rely on the reader to make that connection. Repetition is better.
You said, “The intent of the post is irrelevant.” When I wrote, “of course it is,” the word “it” referred to your word “intent” or, better written, “”of course the intent is relevant.” It could have been read to mean that I agreed with you, when I didn’t.
Over the top, seal!
The worst lines of this comment have been removed on 11/30/23. And commenter Seal has been nearly universally admonished.
Very sad, regardless of the circumstances, whether ill-conceived or not. how much better the story outcome might have been had she actually first coordinated with the fire-fighting entities/orgs to prescribe safe training practices. No one should ever go into ocean waters alone at night, whether you’re a swimmer, or biologist, or fisher or just a recreationalist. Its just that simple. Its an environment with many, many risks. Blessings to her family…
I should add to my above comment, that one of the things I learned most as a marine biologist, and as a sampler of myriad, marine environments, was that my respect for the vastness of marine environments absolutely dominated my idea that I could operate, unaffected, in these quarters. We are visitors, and unless we do the homework, we’re at risk.
I will second that comment, retired. Not only are we visitors, we are some of the most vulnerable, if not the most vulnerable, visitors. It is an amazing world that does also indeed carry risks.
Swimming alone at night at dog is great
I’m not ignorant
Why is her business your business?
What lurks on the sand is a far greater threat
It’s a dark beach
And I’m not talking about lights
I accept what is
I don’t believe it was his intent to be cruel or heartless, if you have read seal’s past comments you would know that is not the kind of person he is.
Um, I can’t even imagine why anybody would get into the water at Dog Beach? I have spent countless hours there with the pets… Many sightings of Brown Trout (sic) floating down the river. This ain’t a swimming hole…
Gotta disagree there Jay Bird. The ocean is fine unless there is a spill in the river. I might not swim in the river myself but lots of people do. Swimming at night, however, would never be advisable.
As you know, DB is a popular surfing area so obviously, people go in the water there all the time.
Geoff, it’s okay. These negative reaction comments from people that most likely have never faced the emotional impact the person/people will have that find the results of the very bad choice this woman made to swim in the ocean alone at night unless, of course, they work S&R or other emergency work that comes face to face with these situations.
I still see quite clearly, as I paddled through a wave on my 5’10” shortboard, into the shocked face and wide open and deeply empty eyes of the young mother as the nose poked into her face. I was what, a foot away? It’s been almost 40 years since that happened…and I would spare people that if I could. Or the bodies found washed up on beaches in Baja surf trips and how they looked. Big sigh. And yes, my motivation was not to be cruel but to be honest because being ‘civilized’ we really don’t want to think of ourselves as just a meal for some other predator…while we eat our steak and eggs breakfast. Maybe people wouldn’t make so many of these kinds of mistakes if they had been educated about nature’s rules?
Jon: in terms you should understand, nature is not cruel but very very unforgiving with those that make a mistake like this. Our hunter/gatherer land ancestors knew this quite well as did our ancient seafaring ancestors. We are too divorced from the nature that keeps our species alive, and the ocean has its own rules. Best people know them before they venture into it. Would you feels this way about people who climb the fences of the tiger’s cage at the zoo or drive way too fast on bald tires without a seat belt on in a rainstorm?
Devon: Yep, drivel until it happens to you. Then it becomes a life-long memory that affects one deeply. What I hope is that her children will be taught better thinking skills than she showed here. Know the risks before you jump in.
If you swim alone at night in the ocean which your comment suggests, you aren’t much different than those who climb fences in zoos. Which is okay as long as YOU accept the potential consequences of taking those risks. I’ve taken risks all my life; surfed all my life, dropped at speed in concrete pools, hiked backcountry in wild snow-covered mountains in -20’F with a snowboard on my back, taught Kenpo Karate for over 30 years, and jumped into freezing wild rivers multiple times to save people who were flat out experiencing death by drowning. I have always known the risks, and accepted them. So far I’ve still been lucky…
Now it’s time to pull on the very cold weather clothes and go fire up a 22ton woodsplitter and get these big rounds busted up before it starts snowing again. I definitely know the risks involved in operating machinery like this, so I take precautions before I start the motor and while operating it. I do my best to not put myself in harm’s way due to ignorance.
sealintheSelkirks
Kinda milking the one dead body you found there, eh? When I grew up in El Cajon before moving to OB at a teen, I saw lots of dead bodies. Dead people who ODd from this and that. I had a friend of mine take a stray bullet to the face while we were playing in the front yard in first grade. As a teen, I was in the back seat of a car that got into an accident and had to listen as my friend’s mom choked on her own blood while we were pinned in the car. As an adult, I’ve seen countless dead bodies in countless ways. I’ve had to pick up the toddler that the parents hanged in the garage, I’ve had to strain the soup out of chairs, I’ve had to see the results of people on their worst days decide that it was their last day.
Get over it, and stop trying to swing your one experience over everyone. Get some therapy instead of being disrespectful.
Thanks Doug. Selkirk, I grew up with Amy, while I agree it is not a wise decision to go swim at night in the ocean by yourself, your comments are pretty fucked up. Her kids will read what you wrote about their mother, that sucks man. Amy was not a stupid person, overconfident in her swimming abilities possibly but she was not stupid. To her kiddos who will most likely find this thread, your mother was a beautiful person and I have so many great memories with her, please don’t let online bullies who never met her sway your opinion.
Amy grew up in Tierrasanta, that means lots of her friends, just like me are going to come across this thread and read some total strangers opinion on a person he never met. Losing a friend is hard enough, is it really necessary to pour salt on an open wound? You found a dead body in the ocean, ok, so have I. It’s not that crazy if you grew up surfing in San Diego, it doesn’t give you a free ticket to be such a dick head. Jesus man, she has 3 kids and a family she hasn’t been found yet , that’s tough on the family that’s tough on her friends, your comments seem to me more like a way to tell everybody that you found a dead body and you want EVERYONE to know. That’s great dude, stop being a dick. Show a little decency man Jesus Christ.
Editordude: Enough has been said about this post and the comments to it are now closed. Seal has been admonished nearly universally.