DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — A woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years, including one nearby in Delray Beach, the city's police department said Wednesday.
Lyndsey Kennedy, of Delray Beach, suffered minor injuries after being pulled from a canal near the 500 block of Lindell Boulevard. Rescuers took her to Delray Medical Center for further evaluation.
Kennedy, 43 at the time, was naked on March 23, 2021, when she was rescued from a storm drain by Delray Beach Fire Rescue near 475 Canal Point North. She claimed she entered a drain 3 miles away and three weeks earlier after swimming in a canal at the intersection of West Atlantic and Southwest 11th avenues in West Delray.
Two months later, she was pulled from a drain in Grand Prairie, Texas.
In Wednesday's incident, officers and firefighters around noon responded to a call of someone possibly in distress while swimming in a canal.
When officers asked if she needed help, the woman climbed into a storm drain pipe. She refused to come out and began crawling farther into the culvert pipe, which crossed under Lindell Boulevard.
Firefighters contained her between two sections of pipe, and Special Operations Team members used a ladder and rescue harness to get her out.
In the March 23, 2021 incident, the woman had been reported missing by her boyfriend weeks earlier.
She told police she went for a swim on that date in a canal near her boyfriend's home at the Oasis apartment complex.
A witness told police they heard Kennedy yelling for help while stuck in the drain.
The woman said while swimming she came across a doorway near a shallow part of the canal, which she entered and found a tunnel.
Out of curiosity, Kennedy said she then followed the tunnel, which led to multiple other tunnels, causing her to become lost.
She told police she walked around the labyrinth of tunnels for about three weeks before spotting some light and saw people walking past her, prompting her to sit in place at that location.
"She mentioned she had been in the storm drain for weeks," Delray Beach police spokesman Ted White said at the time. "We, from the police department standpoint, find it very hard to believe that she spent that amount of time down there. You need food and water, and so some things don't add up."
White added that she found an unopened bottle of ginger ale and that is what she drank.
The woman's mother also said Kennedy has done other odd things in the past and has a history of "making bad decisions when she is high on drugs," according to the police report.
