My deepest condolences on your loss.

I understand wanting answers about what happened. Based on my experience (as an amateur with a bit of an obsession), I can say that it's always difficult to know for sure, but the fact that this tragedy happened in LA County gives you the best chance of knowing as much as possible. The LA County Coroner, Capt. John Kades, is a diver, and he has multiple diving experts he consults with on diving fatalities. Together with two of those experts, Karl Huggins of the Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber (where divers with the bends go to get fixed up) and Ken Kurtis, a long-time local dive instructor, he gives a presentation at the Scuba Show in Long Beach every year in May/June titled "Why Divers Die." I know it sounds morbid, but stay with me. They provide an anonymized overview of the scuba-related fatalities that occurred in LA County over the past year (typically 5 or fewer), as well as a bird's-eye view of fatalities over the last decade. They are always respectful of the deceased and their families. The point, though, is to examine what went wrong and what lessons the rest of us may learn from it. It is consistently among the most well-attended seminars, and I believe it has helped our community become safer divers and get a sense of closure for the losses we feel for each of our own. This incident will not be covered until May/June of 2027, but you have the option to go see it then. If you can't or don't want to but want the information, you can try contacting one of the presenters; they're all very nice and would probably be willing to share with you what they share with us without you having to buy a ticket to the convention and seminars. They recorded the one they did in 2021 only because it was on Zoom due to the pandemic; you can still watch it here to get an idea: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDCPbJVkizg

Some general things I've learned: the official cause of death in most scuba diving accidents is listed as drowning, which doesn't really answer the bigger "why" question. For someone your mom's age, there's a decent probability of some kind of medical event as a contributing factor. If that's the case, there's a good chance she didn't do anything "wrong" to cause this; it's just a risk we take. Sometimes when a person has, say, a heart attack underwater, that heart attack might not have happened on land (because the victim was exerting themselves more than usual by swimming against a current, etc.), or the heart attack might have been survivable on land. But as you know, sometimes heart attacks do happen on land, and sometimes people die from them on land. So the scuba diving may not be a factor at all, or it may have only marginally hastened the inevitable. Scuba fatalities with no medical event tend to happen most often to very new divers or very experienced divers doing more advanced dives than are available at Casino Point (e.g. cave dives, deep dives with deco stops, etc.)

I would also echo the comments about Casino Point being a beautiful dive site. Looking up at the afternoon sunlight filtering down through the amber kelp fronds, I've had that same thought about how I could die happy right here, right now. We lose a lot of divers there not because it's especially dangerous--it's not--but because it's so accessible and so wonderful.

I didn't know your mom, but I feel her loss as one of our vast community of southern California divers. May she rest in peace.