Mr. Eric Moreland Jones is the recipient of the Office of the Secretary Defense Medal of Valor, and he had his life touched by flight. He is the son of Mr. Conway B. Jones, Jr., CTC Foundation Vice Chairman.

Sadly enough, his contact with flight was a result of the terrorist air attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Eric is credited with saving several lives in this attack, as well as helping recover the 184 bodies of those Americans who lost their lives. He was a volunteer firefighter who happened to be driving near the Pentagon when the airplane hit. He voluntarily remained at his post for 72 hours.

He also helped rescue a Marine Corps flag from the rubble in the Pentagon, for which he was commended by the Commandant of the Marine Corps.

Editor's note: The files of the National Air and Space Society, Wall of Honor project, contain additional information about the actions of Eric Jones following the attack on the Pentagon. Included is a magazine article, a video disk of the award ceremony, and a copy of the award certificate.

The link to the on-line version is:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/California-ocean-sneaker-wave…

A boy was swept into the ocean. His story reveals the hidden danger of California?€™s sneaker waves
By Nora Mishanec | May 1, 2021

Upon reaching the bottom of the steps leading to Cowell Ranch State Beach, 8-year-old Siddhant Pruthi grabbed a fistful of sand and turned to his older brother, Arunay. Ahead lay the Pacific Ocean and an afternoon free of the pandemic?€™s confinements.
?€?Dadabhai,?€? Siddhant said, addressing his 12-year-old brother with a Bengali term of endearment. ?€?This is a bad beach.?€?
He was referring to the rocks in the sand, nothing more. The boys?€™ parents walked over to greet their cluster of friends camped near the base of a cliff. The tight-knit pandemic bubble of four families often met along the San Mateo County coast on weekends. This was the Fremont family?€™s first time at Cowell, a secluded cove south of Half Moon Bay.
Sharmistha and Tarun Pruthi chatted with the others while pitching a tent they had brought to shelter themselves from the midafternoon sun on a warm January day. The beach was full of families. They didn?€™t think anything of their youngest son approaching the water?€™s edge to feel the cold surf graze his feet.
But the wave that came next wasn?€™t ankle-deep, as previous waves had been. This one blasted Siddhant as he tried to run from it, first knocking him down and then dragging him under.
In the split-second it took for Sharmistha to turn around, her husband Tarun was already sprinting into the ocean. Sharmistha ran after him. She could feel the sand shifting beneath her feet as she threw herself into the water toward her husband and son. Rocked by the force of the oncoming waves, soon, all three were immersed in the churning water.
After several attempts to propel himself toward Siddhant during the lull between waves, Tarun could not reach his son. Sharmistha managed to grab hold of Siddhant?€™s hand, but only for a moment, losing her grip as one wave after another crashed over them. Sharmistha said she thinks she lost consciousness underwater.
On the beach, friends and strangers linked arms to form a human chain. Somehow, the group hauled the family onto the sand: Siddhant, then Tarun, and finally Sharmistha. Tarun and Sharmistha lacked the strength to stand. But they had survived.
?€?Arunay is keeping his head above water,?€? someone told him.
The statement struck Tarun as odd. Arunay isn?€™t in the water.
Sharmistha, surrounded by the strangers who she said saved her life, regained her senses and stood. What she saw as she looked toward the ocean made her want to rush back in: ?€?I saw his head,?€? she said. ?€?I knew who it was.?€?
Unbeknownst to the parents, as their attention was focused on saving Siddhant, another massive wave had hit the shoreline and swept Arunay into the ocean.
Tarun called out to Arunay, but he knew it was too late. A rip current was pulling the boy farther and farther away.
In the seven weeks before the Pruthi family?€™s visit to the coast on Jan. 18, seven people had been fatally swept from Bay Area beaches into the Pacific Ocean.
A toddler on a holiday outing. A man taking a break from his job as a handyman. A father and his two children. A woman foraging for sea urchins. A man exploring the shoreline with friends.
A tragic fact united the seven deaths: They occurred on days authorities had issued coastal hazard warnings. The National Weather Service alerted the public to perilous high tides, rip currents and sneaker waves on 41 days between November and February ?€” twice as many as the same period a year earlier.
Witness descriptions of the wave that pitched Arunay into the surf bore the hallmarks of a sneaker wave: Called ?€?extreme runup events?€? by scientists, they catch victims by surprise, dragging them into the ocean as the ground beneath their feet ?€?suddenly becomes inundated,?€? researchers at Oregon State University wrote in a 2018 paper, one of the first attempts to define the phenomenon.
Anyone who has spent time along the Northern California coast has likely experienced waves that arrive during periods of calm and travel far higher up the shore, swamping chairs and towels and sand castles that had seemed well out of harm?€™s way. Sneaker waves similarly catch beachgoers off-guard, but are rarer events that strike with much more water and with the force to knock adults off their feet.
?€?They pull you out fully clothed and then you?€™re in a world of trouble,?€? said Brian Garcia, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Sometimes called sleeper waves, they form during offshore storms that transfer energy to the ocean surface. Meteorologists track oceanic storms to predict when sneaker waves will come crashing into the Northern California coast days later.
In any given year, the Bay Area may see one or two sneaker wave deaths. But the period from November to January was deadlier than any stretch authorities had seen before. And they knew the reasons: an unusually high number of sneaker waves, a warm spell caused by La Ni?±a weather, and a flood of families using beaches to escape the pandemic shutdown.
?€?It was a recipe for disaster,?€? Garcia said.
One question has haunted Tarun and Sharmistha since that January day at the beach: If the experts knew the risks, why didn?€™t we?
?€?Is that your son??€?
Sharmistha remembers the question. She remembers begging whoever asked it to let her go into the water after Arunay. Her friends on the beach gripped her arms to hold her back. That?€™s my child.
The first 911 call came at 3:42 p.m. According to a California State Parks incident report, personnel from seven government agencies responded to the remote beach, whose entrance lay at the end of a half-mile footpath through mustard flower fields.
Handyman David Barba was swept away from the rocks beneath Pacifica?€™s Municipal Pier in December. His body was found at Fort Funston weeks later.
| Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle
More 911 calls followed; recordings obtained by the Chronicle capture harrowing screams in the background as callers beg for help.
The last person to touch Arunay was family friend Sanjeev Kulkarni. He had been playing Frisbee near the camp when he heard someone call out, ?€?Siddy?€™s in the water!?€?
Kulkarni joined the rush of friends and family to the shoreline and saw Arunay. His first instinct was to try to get to Siddhant, but then he spotted Arunay standing on the beach. He ran toward the boy and grabbed his hand. But the sand began moving beneath their feet, tugging them toward the ocean. The water swelled up to their knees.
He did not think they were in danger, he said. He thought they would be able to get out of the water.
But suddenly, Kulkarni said, a ?€?giant, monstrous?€? wave hit them.
?€?I got thrown in the water,?€? he said. ?€?I lost contact with (Arunay). I drank water. It was spinning me.?€?
After tumbling for what he estimates was about 30 seconds, he was thrown back to shore, where someone pulled him to safety.
?€?I was dazed,?€? he said.
Kulkarni, his shoulder dislocated from the turbulence, returned to the camp, where he found Siddhant wrapped in a stranger?€™s blanket. Arunay was not there, nor were his parents.
It was then that he looked out at the water and saw Arunay. The boy was floating away.
Nearby, Tarun and Sharmistha watched in horror as their son tried to stay afloat.
?€?I howled and cried,?€? Sharmistha said.
Dispatchers?€™ notes in the 911 call log only hint at their agony as they watched their son in the violent surf.
?€?Too far out for anyone on the beach to get him,?€? a dispatcher noted after speaking with a bystander.
Three minutes later: ?€?Trying to stay adrift.?€?
Three minutes later: ?€?Starting to go under for longer periods of time.?€?
Cary Smith, a San Mateo County Harbor District officer, was in his patrol boat at Pillar Point Harbor, 10 miles to the north, when a dispatcher?€™s voice over his radio said a boy was trapped in a rip current. He sped down the coast over waves as high as 20 feet. The water that day was ?€?unbelievably rough,?€? he said.
From an overlook, rescuers pointed binoculars at the water. Smith maneuvered the boat to the area where those on the cliff had last seen Arunay.
The trained people are here, Sharmistha thought. Now they will get Arunay.
But because the two lifeguards dispatched to the beach did not see the boy, they did not enter the water, said Gabriel McKenna, a State Parks public safety superintendent. Had they spotted him, they would have had to decide whether they could emerge from a rescue mission alive.
?€?From a rescuer?€™s perspective,?€? Smith said, ?€?there was nothing that could be done.?€?
Nearly two hours after they had last seen their son in the water, the parents left the beach at the urging of San Mateo County sheriff?€™s deputies. It was dark as they ascended the wooden stairs to the overlook and walked to the parking lot to be interviewed for a police report and await word on their son.
A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter whirred overhead, its roving search lights trained on the ocean. In the place where Arunay had been, the lights found only the sea.
Tarun and Sharmistha left and checked into a room at the Half Moon Bay Lodge after 10 p.m. The parents hugged their son Siddhant goodbye ?€” ?€?Go with Auntie for the night?€? ?€” but then returned to Cowell.
They brought a blanket and a backpack full of dry clothes for Arunay. He might be waiting on the beach.
The Pruthi family shared these photographs of their son Arunay from over the years

When they descended the staircase, they encountered two strangers who had heard a boy was missing and were searching the sand. Tarun and Sharmistha joined them, roaming the quarter-mile stretch before heading back to the hotel after midnight.
At daybreak, the helicopter returned.
Coast Guard search-and-rescue teams use computer modeling to calculate how long a person in distress can survive in open water, accounting for age and body type. Using real-time data from ocean buoys, the teams try to predict where a person would drift.
To avoid unnecessary danger to rescuers, a mission coordinator helps make the decision to end searches when there is no hope. Three hours after resuming operations in the morning, two Coast Guard representatives met the Pruthis at the hotel. There was, they explained, little chance of finding the boy alive.
?€?They were showing us drawings and data and all the research,?€? Tarun said. ?€?They gave us a bunch of papers.?€?
The parents could not believe their son was lost. To them, Arunay was still the boy at the dinner table who had, less than two weeks earlier, compared the Capitol Hill riot to the plot of ?€?Animal Farm?€?; the son whose interest in politics had grown in the months since his mother took him to a Black Lives Matter protest; the soccer fanatic; the child who alternately fought and played with his younger brother when the coronavirus shrunk their worlds overnight.
At 10:20 a.m. on Jan. 19, after 17 hours, the Coast Guard called off its search.
A growing group of family members, friends and strangers was already mobilizing. For them, the search for Arunay was just beginning.

A view of the coastline near Half Moon Bay during a March helicopter flight chartered to search for the 12-year-old?€™s body.

Arunay?€™s disappearance ended a deadly two-month period that began with another child?€™s death, on another Bay Area beach.
On Nov. 26, the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, 4-year-old Katherine Huajun Xu of Pinole died after being dragged into the surf on a family outing to McClures Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore. Her father charged in after her and survived. The waves carried Katherine?€™s body back to shore 45 minutes later.
On Dec. 8, a handyman was on a break from a job in Pacifica when a wave snatched him from the rocks beneath the municipal pier. Bystanders scrambled to find a rope, but David Barba, 31, was gone before they could reach him. His body washed ashore at Fort Funston in San Francisco nearly a month later.
The season?€™s horror intensified on Jan. 3, when three members of a Petaluma family were killed at Blind Beach in Jenner. Michael Wyman, 40, drowned while trying to save his two children, 7-year-old Anna and 4-year-old John, who had been swept to sea. Rescuers recovered Wyman?€™s body that day. The children?€™s bodies were recovered two weeks later. Their mother, who was on the beach with them, lost her entire family.
The following Sunday, Jan. 10, saw two more deaths. First, a wave pulled three friends into the ocean beneath Point Bonita Lighthouse at the Marin Headlands. Two made it back to shore, but the third, identified only as a San Jose resident in his 30s, has not been found.
Amid the incident, Coast Guard officials diverted one helicopter to a second rescue mission, which unfolded less than one hour later. Forty miles down the coast, at Pescadero State Beach, a wave overtook 37-year-old Redwood City resident Xuanxi He and her husband as they looked for sea urchins. The husband washed back to shore and survived. Xuanxi, her waders filling with water, was pulled under. Authorities recovered her body south of Half Moon Bay two weeks later.
The toll could have been worse. Authorities reported a string of near-misses, including one just 30 minutes before the Pruthi family?€™s ordeal began.
No single agency tracks sneaker wave deaths year to year. One reason for the lack of data: Experts shy away from labeling what is and isn?€™t a sneaker wave, unless they witness the event.
Without video footage, it?€™s impossible to know what exactly pulled Siddhant and Arunay into the surf that day, said H. Tuba ?–zkan-Haller, a professor of earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University. The waves that witnesses described had the characteristics of sneaker waves, she said. The waves sometimes arrive in sets, the first few the most powerful.
?–zkan-Haller, an expert in wave mechanics and nearshore hydrodynamics, said she had not heard of sneaker waves until she moved to Oregon 20 years ago. They affect a subset of coastal areas where the continental shelf is too narrow to provide a buffer from powerful waves unleashed by oceanic storms. Aside from Northern California, Oregon and southern Washington, ?–zkan-Haller knows of only one other area with a similarly hazardous submarine topography: Iceland.
Icelandic lore is filled with cautionary tales about waves that sneak up on unsuspecting beachgoers, ?–zkan-Haller said, but people in California and Oregon often underestimate the danger of the ocean.
Deaths like Arunay?€™s are rarely attributed to sneaker waves. State Parks labeled his disappearance an aquatic incident; the National Weather Service called it a high-surf death, referring to the category of warnings in effect that day.
Near the stairs leading down to the beach where Arunay was last seen is a small blue sign that reads, ?€?Tsunami hazard zone,?€? accompanied by the image of a cartoon person scrambling to escape an oncoming wave. There is no sign warning against sneaker waves, which strike Bay Area beaches with far greater regularity than tsunamis.
Tarun and Sharmistha never imagined they would lose one son, and almost lose another, to a phenomenon they hadn?€™t heard of. In the aftermath, they wanted two things: to find his body and to make sure no parent lost a child the same way again.

Eric Jones searches for Arunay's body during a March helicopter flight. Jones is founder of Sea Valor, which teaches sailing to people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
| Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

The Bay Area coast stretches 148 miles from the mouth of the Gualala River in Sonoma County to the jutting ledge of A?±o Nuevo Point in San Mateo County. Over millions of years, the surging Pacific has marked its terraced cliffs with coves and caves.
Arunay could have been anywhere.
Though the official search had ended, the Pruthis?€™ circle of friends planned to continue on. One, Maneesh Saxena, set up a fundraising website and a Facebook page called ?€?Search for Arunay Pruthi?€? that, within days, gained thousands of followers and more than $200,000. Acquaintances and strangers contributed from as far away as India and Germany.
One of the strangers offering assistance was Eric Jones. A paramedic awarded the Medal of Valor for pulling victims of the Sept. 11 attacks from the Pentagon, Jones runs Sea Valor, an organization that teaches people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to sail.
Though Jones?€™ past had attuned him to tragedy, the circumstances of Arunay?€™s death jolted him, he said. After meeting with Tarun and Sharmistha, he proposed a plan to locate the body, calling it ?€?The Teddy Bear Experiment.?€?
Jones stuffed a giant teddy bear with weights until it approximated a 95-pound boy, strapped it into a life vest equipped with a satellite tracking device, and dropped it from a helicopter over the spot where Arunay was last seen. He dropped three buoys as well, letting them drift. The idea was to chart the body?€™s possible travel in Bay Area currents, narrowing the search area.
But the bear floated as far north as Bodega Bay. One buoy ended up as far south as Big Sur.
So the Pruthis instead launched a sprawling search that spanned the Bay Area coast and involved divers, dogs, personal watercraft, boats, helicopters and volunteers on foot. The plan was to visit every inch of shore.
The family hired helicopters to fly low as Jones and other volunteers peered into each cove. Using image-stabilizing binoculars, they scanned for the white shirt the boy had been wearing. A drone operator, meanwhile, took tens of thousands of thermal camera scans of the water that were eyeballed by volunteers. A boat with a sonar tracking device scanned the sea floor.
Each day brought them closer to the six week cut-off point at which it becomes unlikely a body will resurface. The volunteers who returned to the water day after day said they sought to give the Pruthi family one thing: closure.
In the taxonomy of loss, bereavement counselors say the most difficult emotion is not sadness or regret, but uncertainty.
Humans are hard-wired to seek meaning in loss in order to process it, said Naomi Tzril Saks, a chaplain in the Division of Palliative Medicine at UCSF. Without a body to mourn, Saks said, family members may forever feel the lingering presence of their missing loved one.
?€?The mind wanders, the heart wanders,?€? she said.
The experience of grieving without a body is so specific that psychologists have a name for it: ambiguous loss. For families, the process of finding closure, so prevalent in our cultural discourse around death, may be nearly impossible.
The word closure implies an abrupt finality, a closing of a chapter. But grief is not like that, Saks said. In the absence of a funeral, grief over the uncertainty of a loved one?€™s death can last a lifetime.
?€?It?€™s very hard to heal when you have hope that somewhere, something is going to give you a clue of what happened,?€? Saks said.
For Tarun, the hardest part of moving on was knowing his son?€™s death could have been prevented.
Shortly after the couple moved to California from Maryland, they took Arunay to the beach in Half Moon Bay, not far from where he would vanish nine years later. Siddhant was not yet born. The family didn?€™t even think to take sweaters that spring day in 2012, Tarun said. In their minds, the California coast evoked images of beach balls and children splashing in the surf.
?€?We just didn?€™t know,?€? he said. ?€?We didn?€™t even think that this could happen.?€?
California schoolchildren regularly rehearse for earthquakes and practice fire drills, yet few leave school with a commensurate respect for the dangers of the ocean. Several public officials said they believe Bay Area schools should teach children how to avoid sneaker waves and rip currents.
?€?Never tell a parent, ?€?These things happen,?€™?€? Tarun said.
In time, the Pruthis want to create a foundation in Arunay?€™s name to advocate for beach safety. For now, their sights are set on a simpler task: a bench overlooking the water at Cowell. One recent afternoon, the parents returned, for the first time, to select a location for the bench on the beach overlook.
They hope the bench will be completed in May, the month Arunay would have celebrated his 13th birthday.
In his final year of life, Arunay?€™s parents watched him grow into an independent thinker and a devoted soccer player. He spent many nights practicing for an upcoming try-out with the Olympic Development Program for youth soccer.
?€?There were big dreams,?€? Sharmistha said.
The boy had developed a love for film, nurtured by Sharmistha. Mother and son would discuss at length what made each film good and why. The last movie they had watched together was ?€?The Shawshank Redemption.?€?
?€?I used to tell him, ?€?Whichever movie you like, go back to it every few years, because as we grow more mature our thinking changes,?€™?€? she said. ?€?You get a different perspective.?€?
They were supposed to watch more movies together. They thought they had a lifetime to do it.
On Feb. 28, Tarun and Sharmistha posted a final message on the Facebook page, a thank you to the thousands of people who donated time and money.
?€?Arunay gives us back more than what the sea could ever take,?€? they wrote. ?€?His beautiful eyes will stay with us forever and fuel our gratitude.?€?
They continued: ?€?Today, let us all pledge that never again will an innocent child play on the beach, unaware of the dangers lurking nearby. Never again will a mother stand on a beach and hope for her child to be washed ashore, never again will a family have to plead for search operations to continue, never again will anyone lose their loved one to the sea.?€?
In early March, Arunay?€™s parents commissioned one last flight to look for his body. The helicopter scanned the coast from Bodega Bay to Big Sur. Through the window in the cockpit, Jones pointed binoculars into every cove, hoping for any sign of a body, a t-shirt, a clue.

Eric Jones carries a bouquet of flowers to a helicopter in March before the second leg of a chartered flight to search for the boy?€™s body.
| Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle

The day was exceptionally calm. The shadow of the spinning blades danced on the ocean as the helicopter flew over the craggy pinnacles that jut from the water near Cowell Ranch State Beach.
The pilot hovered over the place where Arunay was last seen as Jones opened the door and let go of a bouquet ?€” white roses, lilies and snapdragons bound with twine. The flowers hit the water and disappeared.

Nora Mishanec is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nora.mishanec@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NMishanec