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Modesto firefighter Zion Maghoney was standing waist-deep in the clear water of Eagle Lake when one swimmer caught his attention.
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Most people in the alpine lake near Lake Tahoe were swimming leisurely, often in groups. This man was alone, hundreds of feet from shore and swimming hard toward a small island.
Then Maghoney watched him begin rolling from his stomach onto his back.
His head sank lower. His arms began flailing. He stopped making progress.
Then came the cries for help.
“Somebody help me! Somebody help me, please,” Maghoney recalled hearing.
Within minutes, the 24-year-old off-duty firefighter would be hundreds of feet from shore himself, trying to tow the exhausted swimmer through the water, and approaching his own physical limit.
Maghoney ultimately needed the help of three other swimmers to get the man onto a small rock protruding from the lake, where they waited for rescuers to arrive.
The man was eventually flown to a hospital, Maghoney said.
Looking back nearly two weeks later, Maghoney believes a lifetime of experiences – learning to swim as a child, practicing makeshift water rescues with his firefighter father and eventually becoming a firefighter himself – prepared him for what happened Aug. 1.
“It almost feels like everything that I’ve done in my life has played a part into this moment,” Maghoney said.
A family outing turns into a rescue
Maghoney had traveled to the Lake Tahoe area with his girlfriend, their 16-month-old daughter and his girlfriend’s family.
The group hiked roughly a mile from the Eagle Falls trailhead near Emerald Bay to Eagle Lake, where they planned to spend some time by the water before hiking back.
The family was running late that day. In hindsight, Maghoney said that seemingly insignificant delay has stuck with him.
“If we would have got there on time, we probably would have left already by the time this all went down,” he said.
At the lake, Maghoney’s family settled near the shore while he waded into the water.
That’s when he noticed the lone swimmer, who Maghoney estimated was at least 300 feet away.
At first, the man simply appeared to be swimming unusually hard. Maghoney wondered whether he was exercising.
But Maghoney had swum in a youth program at Modesto Junior College. He knew what exhaustion in the water felt like, and what he saw began to concern him.
The swimmer repeatedly flipped onto his back and then his stomach. From the distance, Maghoney could see the man’s head getting progressively lower in the water.
Then his arms began flailing.
“He’s not making any more progress,” Maghoney recalled. “He’s kind of like floating just vertical out there in the water.”
When the man began yelling for help, Maghoney said people along the shore initially appeared caught off guard.
Maghoney’s family didn’t even see him leave.
He climbed out of the lake and ran along a trail bordering the shoreline to close some of the distance before jumping back into the water. From there, he estimated the struggling swimmer was still about 300 to 350 feet away.
Maghoney began swimming toward him.
When he got within about 50 feet, Maghoney yelled for the man to swim toward him. The swimmer didn’t respond to the instruction and continued flailing.
By the time Maghoney was about 20 feet away, he said he could see the man’s head disappearing completely beneath the surface.
“That’s when I knew he was seconds away from drowning,” Maghoney said.
‘I was reaching my physical limit’
Maghoney reached the man and instructed him to put an arm around his neck.
He began swimming backward, telling the man to kick his legs and move his arms to help.
Instead, the swimmer fell backward. “He just falls back, and he’s just dead weight,” Maghoney said.
The man remained conscious and alert, Maghoney said, but appeared to have no energy left.
Maghoney began towing him.
It quickly became clear how difficult that would be.
As he swam, Maghoney noticed another man approaching through the water. The second swimmer reached them and took the struggling man’s other arm, allowing the two to pull him together.
“Had it been another 30 seconds, I don’t know,” Maghoney said. “I would have had to let him go and get to shore because I was getting pretty exhausted swimming with him.”
Going back to the original shoreline was no longer their best option. Instead, they tried to reach the island toward which the swimmer had been headed.
Maghoney’s own condition began deteriorating.
He struggled to control his breathing. His head hurt. Staying afloat became increasingly difficult.
“I knew I was reaching my physical limit,” he said.
Two young women who had been on the island saw what was happening and swam toward them.
Maghoney told one of the women he needed to swap out. She took his place supporting the exhausted man while Maghoney tried to recover.
That’s when he spotted something closer than the island: a tiny rock protruding from the lake.
The group changed course.
After another roughly 20 to 30 feet, they reached it and pulled the swimmer onto the rock.
Maghoney was spent.
“I literally couldn’t get a word out for a couple of minutes,” he said.
The others began asking the man basic questions. Maghoney described him as giving short answers and appearing panicked and exhausted.
Once Maghoney could speak again, he instructed the others to place the swimmer on his left side in the recovery position.
But they still had another problem: They were stranded in the lake without a flotation device.
Waiting for rescuers
Cell service around the lake was limited, Maghoney said.
One of the women began yelling toward shore, asking someone to call 911 and tell dispatchers there was a swimmer stranded on a rock who needed a flotation device.
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Maghoney said someone was eventually able to communicate with 911, apparently through an emergency SOS feature.
The group waited on the rock for what Maghoney estimated was at least 30 minutes before two lifeguards arrived.
The lifeguards swam out with fins and a flotation buoy. Maghoney briefed them on what had happened, and they took the swimmer back toward shore, where fire personnel began treating him, he said.
Even after resting on the rock, Maghoney didn’t believe he had enough energy to safely make the roughly 100-foot swim back. He told the lifeguards he would need help, too.
After getting the rescued man to shore, they returned for Maghoney and assisted him back.
The three other swimmers were able to return on their own.
Maghoney said the man eventually was taken by helicopter to a local hospital. He later contacted the North Tahoe Fire Protection District and was told the man appeared to be doing OK when he was flown out, though medical privacy laws prevented officials from providing additional information, he said.
A lesson from his firefighter father
As Maghoney struggled through the water with the man’s arm around his neck, something unexpected came back to him.
He remembered being a kid in a swimming pool with his father.
Maghoney grew up in Modesto and graduated from Enochs High School in 2020. His father has been a Modesto firefighter for roughly 16 years, Maghoney said, and Zion grew up wanting to follow him into the profession.
His father would make Maghoney, his siblings and cousins practice water rescues in the pool.
One drill involved putting another person’s arm around their neck and swimming backward while supporting that person’s weight.
“I had this very vivid flashback of my dad,” Maghoney said.
The technique differed from what Maghoney later learned during his professional fire training, he said. During an equipped water rescue, firefighters could have life vests, ropes and other resources.
On Eagle Lake, Maghoney had none of that.
So he went back to what his father had taught him as a child.
Maghoney remembered how exhausted he and the other children would be after towing one another even about 10 feet to the edge of the pool.
Years later, he was trying to do it with an exhausted adult hundreds of feet from shore.
“I thought it was pretty cool how, in the middle of everything going on, I had such a vivid flashback,” he said.
Maghoney spent three fire seasons with Cal Fire before joining the Modesto Fire Department in January 2025. He initially worked on a hand crew before moving to a Type 3 wildland engine during his final Cal Fire season.
The Eagle Lake rescue wasn’t his first water rescue.
While on duty, Maghoney previously helped rescue two women trapped in a vehicle in a canal.
But that time, he had his crew behind him, along with life vests, ropes and other rescue equipment.
At Eagle Lake, he had none of it.
Modesto Fire Chief Shanon Evans said the department is “extremely proud” of Maghoney and the quick decision he made to intervene in what Evans described as a “life-or-death situation.”
“His actions are a great reflection of the character of our firefighters and their commitment to helping others, whether they are on duty or not,” Evans said.
‘Don’t scare me like that again’
Maghoney didn’t have time to tell his girlfriend where he was going before he ran toward the swimmer.
His family heard someone yelling for help and immediately began looking for Maghoney.
They suspected they already knew where he would be.
By then, he was about halfway across the water.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, I think that’s him. I think that’s Zion,’” Maghoney recalled.
Only after the rescue did he begin questioning the decision he’d made almost instinctively.
His young daughter had been waiting on shore.
“If something were to happen to me,” Maghoney said, “I was just thinking about her and my family.”
When he finally made it back to land, simply feeling the ground beneath his feet was a relief.
Then he returned to his family. His girlfriend wasn’t exactly thrilled.
“Don’t scare me like that again,” Maghoney recalled her telling him.
She had been terrified for him. Once the adrenaline subsided, Maghoney said, she acknowledged that going into the water had been the right thing to do.
Maghoney also introduced his family to the man who had swum out to help him.
The second swimmer and the two women from the island, Maghoney stressed, were essential to getting the man to safety.
“I think we all, as a team, me and those three other swimmers, played a big part into what happened that day,” he said.
Maghoney doesn’t particularly want to be called a hero.
He said he acted because he saw someone who needed help and hoped another person would do the same if he or someone he loved were in trouble.
“I felt like I was kind of more just doing the right thing,” Maghoney said.
Still, he can’t shake the convergence of circumstances that put four capable swimmers at Eagle Lake at precisely the right time – or the fact that his own family had arrived later than planned.
His childhood swimming, his firefighter training and even those exhausting rescue drills his father made him practice in the pool all suddenly mattered.
“It feels like it was by divine intervention that we were there with the people that were there at that time,” Maghoney said.
This story was originally published August 15, 2026 at 6:00 AM with the headline “Off-duty Modesto firefighter helps save swimmer from drowning at Tahoe-area lake.”
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