Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Chicago Doctor Drowns After Saving Boys

A pediatric surgeon from Chicago drowned in Lake Michigan after saving two boys who fell out of their kayak.

Dr. Donald Liu jumped into the lake Sunday morning to save the boys, who were family friends, despite objections from his family, who were concerned about the choppy water, the Chicago Tribune reported. The boys, who were not wearing life vests, were struggling in the water after their kayak overturned.

The boys made it back to shore, but Liu was pulled under the water by a dangerous rip current. He was pronounced dead after his wife, Dr. Dana Suskind, also a surgeon, performed CPR on him. He was 50.

Two other people died Sunday in Lake Michigan.

Liu, who converted to Judaism, and his wife had three children. The family had recently visited Shanghai to celebrate his oldest child’s bat mitzvah, according to the newspaper.

Chicago media reported that he would be buried wearing University of Chicago Medicine surgical scrubs and holding a White Sox baseball, a video game and pictures of his children.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.