The Brooklyn teen who drowned on a trip to Bear Mountain was allowed to jump in the water by a chaperone, his grieving father was told, even though the permission slip he signed said nothing about swimming.
Jonas Pierre — whose 16-year-old son Jean Fritz Pierre died Monday when he took a dip in Hessian lake — said his son’s best friend told him a chaperone OK’d the dip, although swimming is not allowed there.
“I want to know [what happened] because I didn’t sign a paper to let him go into the [water],” Jonas Pierre, 39, told DNAInfo.com. “I want the school to face responsibility.”
“There was nothing about swimming in the permission slip to go to the mountain. My son died in a place he was not supposed to be.”
His son’s pal told him that a chaperone watched them swim from a boat. But the supervisor left his post at some point, which is when the teen died.
A DOE spokeswoman declined comment, citing the probe by the Special Commissioner of Investigation.
Friends lost sight of Pierre when he plunged into a sudden drop-off while wading out in the water. Natural springs in the water create an undertow, cops said.
There were five adults assigned to watch over the 48 students, which schools chief Dennis Walcott repeatedly insisted yesterday was adequate.
“It’s totally wrong to think there wasn’t supervision there. There was the proper staff-student ratio,” he said.
Walcott said Pierre slipped away from the pack with a pal.
“They were on their way down and these students disappeared, and unfortunately and tragically, one of them was found in the water,” Walcott said at a later event.
Four other students on the trip were lost for hours when one said they were told to head down the trail by themselves, one of the teens told The Post yesterday.
“We decided to go down and couldn’t find our way,” said Priscila Martinez, 16. “I don’t know where the chaperone was. We were really scared.”
A teacher called the police for the lost teens, but they found their way out of the woods after three hours.
The tragedy came almost exactly three years after Harlem student Nicole Suriel, 12, drowned on a class trip to Long Beach.