MEXICO – A 16-year-old Mexico girl was listed in critical condition at a Lewiston hospital Wednesday night after she was pulled from the Swift River. Her identity was not immediately released.

Mexico police officer Michael Richard said the girl was swimming near Black Bridge when she got into trouble.

“She was swimming and got caught in the current and got lodged between a couple of boulders,” he said. “She was in the water for roughly 20 minutes.”

Richard said the girl was listed in critical condition at Central Maine Medical Center late Wednesday night.

The Oxford County dispatcher summoned Mexico police Sgt. Robert Gallant shortly after 3:45 p.m., saying that a 16-year-old girl had gone over the dam falls behind Ray Carver’s residence at 503 Roxbury Road, which is Route 17.

The dispatcher, who said the girl was under water and could not be seen, then summoned Med-Care Ambulance, Mexico firefighters and a Dixfield police officer.

“She must have been in the water for 15 minutes,” Carver said. “This is an awful thing, you know. It has really upset me. They wouldn’t say whether she was dead or alive, but everybody was crying and carrying on,” he added.

Carver said a girl, who had been swimming in the river, ran up to him at about 3:45 p.m. and asked him to call 911. He did.

“She said that one of the girls down there swimming had got her foot caught in the water,” Carver said.

Carver said he didn’t know the group of youths who had been down at the popular swimming area in the backwater pond behind the dam that was once used by the former J.A. Thurston mill on the Route 120 side of the Swift River.

He also said he didn’t know what town they were from.

“They’d been playing down there a long time. I was sitting here with my brother, and we could hear them giggling. They were playing for a good hour before it happened,” he said.

Carver said the area where the dam is situated is called Hale and is in the town of Mexico. The river is bordered on one side by Route 120 and by Route 17/Roxbury Road on the other.

“We call it Mill Pond, but it’s no place for kids to be playing,” Carver added.

At about 4 p.m., less than 10 minutes after emergency crews were called to the scene, the girl was brought up from the river on a stretcher through Carver’s wooded property, and carried to an ambulance.

Before the ambulance left for Rumford Hospital, a medic could be seen administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the girl.

A wailing woman was led to another Med-Care ambulance by a teenage girl and taken to the hospital, also.

Efforts to reach Mexico police Sgt. Robert Gallant, who is in charge of the investigation, were unsuccessful Wednesday night.

Traffic on Roxbury Road (Route 17) was reduced to one lane between three Med-Care ambulances, a Mexico fire truck, emergency personnel vehicles, a Maine Warden Service truck, and Mexico and Dixfield police cruisers lining the roadsides.

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