A 10-year-old was struggling to stay above water when a stranger at beach became her hero

Teacher Who Saved Drowning Girl at Myrtle Beach Found Dead the Next Day

Earthguardiansonline.com – A rip current dragged a ten-year-old girl more than thirty yards beyond the breaking waves at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on a Friday afternoon in early August. Two men plunged into the churning water within seconds of hearing her cry for help. One of them never came back.

Derrick Moore, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher from outside Atlanta, Georgia, reached the struggling child first. He told her to grip his arm, held on until other beachgoers carrying boogie boards closed the distance, then shoved her toward them so they could haul her to shore. By the time the uncle of the girl — Ernest McCallum, who had also sprinted into the surf — turned to look for Moore, the teacher was gone beneath the waves.

A Trip Meant to Honor a Father

The child at the center of that afternoon’s terror was Summer McCallum, age ten. Her uncle had arranged the Myrtle Beach outing to mark the sixth anniversary of her father’s death. The sun was sinking, the water had seemed calm, and Ernest had stepped away for only a moment. When he looked back, Summer’s head was bobbing in and out of the surf, the rip current already pulling her farther from shore.

He waded in, fighting the same current that had seized his niece. The current swallowed him briefly; when he surfaced, he saw a stranger already beside Summer. He swam back to shore, regrouped with several other men, and returned to the water with boogie boards. But halfway across, Moore had vanished from sight. Summer later told her uncle that the man had coached her through the ordeal — hold the arm, wait for the others, then let them pull you free.

The Man Behind the Rescue

Moore taught at Rockbridge Elementary School, a public school in the Atlanta suburbs where students affectionately called him “Coach.” Most of his career had been spent in classrooms filled with children roughly Summer’s age. Before Rockbridge, he taught at Jolly Elementary School, also near Atlanta, where he earned the 2024 Teacher of the Year distinction.

His brother, Kameron Glasper, recalled that many students at Jolly loved soccer. Moore had never played or coached the sport himself, yet he organized a team anyway so the kids would have an extracurricular activity of their own. Colleague Sherry Weeks described him to local media as an “energetic, polite, special hero” who “did anything and everything with a smile.”

His mother, Suzette Moore, painted a different but equally vivid portrait. She called her son a “free spirit” whose warmth was so extreme that, as a small child, she had taken him to the police department to be fingerprinted — terrified that someone might simply walk away with him because he was so friendly.

A Mother’s Prayer, a Thousand Miles Away

On the evening of the rescue, Suzette was traveling in St. Louis. Her son’s fiancée called with news that shattered the trip: Derrick had gone missing while trying to save a little girl in the ocean. Suzette threw her hands skyward and prayed she would see her son again.

For the family of four children, the fear stretched through the night and into the next day. On August 8, according to the Myrtle Beach Police Department, Derrick Moore’s body washed ashore. He had been in the water long enough for the current to claim him.

What Summer Carries Forward

Ernest McCallum said his niece does not yet fully grasp the gravity of what happened, though she has already endured several family deaths in recent years and knows grief intimately. Holding her uncle’s hand, Summer offered a message she wished she could deliver directly to Moore:

“Thank you, I really owe my life to you.”

She paused, visibly holding back tears, then added:

“I get to go back to school and love my family more than I did.”

McCallum said Moore saved not only Summer’s life but his own as well. He explained that he would have stopped at nothing to reach his niece, even at the cost of his own life. Moore’s intervention meant McCallum never had to make that choice.

“He was a hero before that day. He was a hero to his family, his kids, his daddy, his mama, his family. He was a hero then. He just became a hero to everybody else on Friday,”

McCallum said he wanted to reach Derrick Moore’s family to express gratitude and to learn more about the man who had given everything in those seconds of chaos.

Why Rip Currents Matter

Rip currents are narrow, fast-moving channels of water flowing away from shore, often indistinguishable from the surrounding surf until a swimmer is already being carried. The U.S. Lifesaving Association estimates they are responsible for roughly two-thirds of beach rescues performed by lifeguards nationwide. They do not pull a swimmer under; they exhaust the swimmer, who then panics and struggles, making the current’s grip far harder to escape. The standard survival advice — swim parallel to shore until clear of the channel, then angle back — is nearly impossible to execute when a child is frightened and the current exceeds two to three miles per hour.

Moore’s decision to enter the water without training equipment, without a lifeguard tower, and without knowing the strength of the current turned a textbook survival scenario into a rescue. That the current ultimately overpowered him underscores how unforgiving these channels are, even for a strong adult in good shape. His act did not follow a protocol; it followed an instinct shaped, by every account from his family and colleagues, by a lifetime of putting other people’s safety ahead of his own.

For the students at Rockbridge Elementary who called him “Coach,” and for the soccer players at Jolly who never knew why their teacher showed up at practice, the lesson of that Friday afternoon is both simple and unbearable: the person who organized your after-school game, who smiled through every errand, who was fingerprinted as a toddler because he was too kind to leave alone — that person is gone, and the reason is a ten-year-old girl who will grow up knowing exactly what she owes him.