BURRILLVILLE — It seemed like an ordinary summer day at the town-owned Spring Lake Recreation Area on Monday, children playing in the water or running up to concession windows for ice cream.

Three lifeguards, two on the beach and one on a floating dock at the far end of the roped-off swimming area, kept watch as on any other day. But it was the day after a drowning.

Gregg Goyer, 29, had gone to Spring Lake Beach with his mother and brother on Sunday — a sunny day that drew crowds to the well-kept family-oriented beach. Goyer had recently moved in with his mother in the nearby village of Harrisville. The Goyers couldn’t remember seeing him after 1 p.m. Sunday and figured he was in the arcade or had possibly gone home, police Lt. Kevin S. San Antonio said Monday morning.

At 3 p.m., they asked the beach management to help find him, San Antonio said.

At 4 p.m., the police were called.

Lifeguards did what they’d been trained to do, Burrillville Park and Recreation Director Sheri Hall said Monday. They searched in a matrix and found Goyer around 5:50 p.m. near the floating dock.

He was at the bottom, perhaps 25 yards from shore, San Antonio said Monday morning.

Although Harrisville and Pascoag sent Fire Department search boats, some patrons didn’t realize that anything had happened until Goyer’s body was found and the police closed the beach.

Sunday night, a team from the Harrisville Fire Department helped the lifeguards talk about what happened.

Hall said that searching for a missing person and finding him at the bottom “is a very hard thing to go through.”

The medical examiner’s office will conduct an autopsy, San Antonio said, but Goyer is presumed to have drowned. San Antonio said this is the first drowning he and others can recall at Spring Lake Beach, which, Hall said, the town has operated for the last 20 years.

dnaylor@projo.com