On Saturday 29 August 2026, at around 4 p.m., the disappearance of a 25-year-old man who had not returned to the beach after swimming was reported to emergency services, off the Brune beach at Veyrier-du-Lac, on Lake Annecy.
A search operation was immediately deployed — divers, surface rescuers, drones, dogs. The body was found about thirty metres from shore and around ten metres deep, outside the supervised swimming zone. Pulled from the water in cardiorespiratory arrest, the man could not be revived.
Local French media, including France 3 Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, reported the incident without giving the victim's identity or nationality. It was the Cameroonian press that identified him as Wendji Vades, a 25-year-old Cameroonian student living in Lyon.
According to those same sources, the family is now trying to raise the funds needed to repatriate the body to Cameroon — a frequent and costly step for diaspora families facing a death abroad.
Lake Annecy saw a series of drownings this summer. The Veyrier-du-Lac tragedy came, according to the regional press, a year after an earlier fatal accident at the same spot — off a beach known for how quickly the water deepens once you move away from the edge.
Every summer, the same advice returns: stay in supervised areas, do not overestimate your swimming in cold water, enter gradually. It does nothing to change the fact that a family, thousands of kilometres away, must now organise a return it had not planned for.
