‘Deadliest Catch’ Star Todd Meadows’ Bunkmate Tells How ‘Freak Accident’ Led to His Death

The bunkmate of late Deadliest Catch deckhand Todd Meadows is sharing the details of the “freak accident” that led to his tragic death at sea.

Trey John Green III told Us Weekly that Feb. 25 was a normal day of crabbing on the Aleutian Lady, and that Meadows was helping with the hauling and stacking of pots — massive steel crab traps weighing up to 900 lbs. — when he “entered the pot.”

Meadows “wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Green explained, but the pots then started to move in an unexpected way, leading to a “freak accident” that “should have never happened.”

“I really don’t know how it happened. It should never happen, that pot was never supposed to move. And if it was supposed to move, it should have been stacked. It should have moved from the launcher to where it was supposed to go on deck,” Green claimed. “You know, even more so… the door to the pot was still open. The pot wasn’t ready to… it wasn’t like an accident, like, oh well, maybe we were setting the pot, nothing like that. It was a freak accident, and it should have never happened. But while Todd was inside the pot, he was set overboard inside the pot.”

“The last memory I have with Todd on the boat is he actually, he had, like, a second or two as the pot is going over,” Green recalled. “Todd was turned around in the pot, trying to make his way out.”

Meadows then fell into the water in the pot, which was “the worst feeling” to see. “The initial shock was, like, ‘Holy s—t. How are we going to get this pot back up?’” Green remembered.

Green then rushed to the stern of the boat to try to find his friend in the churning waters of the Bering Sea. “I’ll never forget. Todd has, like, these big, beautiful blue eyes, and I’m on top of the pots, and I spot him. … I can see his blue eyes. He’s probably 100 yards away. He’s swimming,” Green claimed. “We’re trained to point at where he’s at, and you don’t take your finger off of him, you know. So the captain can see where to turn and to turn the boat around to get next to him. And so I’m up on top of the pots. I’m holding on, he’s out. He made it out, which is like a blessing in itself. We thought he was gone, and then I spot him.”

Rescuers then rushed to help Meadows, as they threw life rings to him and sent divers in to load him into the life sling.

“Todd was helping himself get on into the sling. And so we think we got Todd in the sling, and then we come up on the crane to try to get him up. He gets up about halfway, and Todd flips off the sling and falls back into the water,” Green said. “And this is kind of when you know things started to kind of take a dark turn. The second time he tried to get Todd into the sling he was lifeless. Eventually, he did get him back on the sling the second time.”

Meadows was ultimately in the water for between three and five minutes, Green said, and when he was finally brought back on board, the crew performed CPR and used a defibrillator on him, to no avail.

“When he came over the boat, back onto the boat, I mean, he was blue already,” Green shared. “He just never came back.”

Aleutian Lady Captain Rick Shelford announced Meadows’ death at age 25 on Facebook on Sunday. Meadows’ mother has since made a plea that the Discovery show not air any footage of her son’s accident, telling TMZ in a statement, “We don’t want to see any footage from the accident and do not want Discovery to air any of that footage or make money off of our son’s death. We hope they only air good things of Todd on that boat.”

A GoFundMe set up to help support Meadows’ three children has raised more than $49,000 as of Thursday.