Christopher B. Melancon, in La Crosse, Wis., for this past weekend's Oktoberfest celebration, walked across the hall from the apartment where he was staying, befriended a fellow inactive Marine and got a football party moved into his new friend's place.

That was typical of the 24-year-old Iraq veteran and Bloomington resident, said Anthony Triplett, another inactive Marine who was Melancon's best friend and housemate in Bloomington.

"Overall, Chris was just, like, a great guy," said Triplett, who grew up with Melancon in Milwaukee. "Really easy-going."

Melancon, an aspiring filmmaker who served as a Marine for four years, including a stint as a supply clerk in Iraq, had been excited about meeting up with yet another inactive Marine whom he had befriended in Iraq. He, Triplett and their friends watched the Badgers game and at 6 p.m., headed about six blocks toward downtown bars.

But the celebration turned tragic early Sunday when Melancon, who had been drinking heavily, fell about 30 feet off a bridge and drowned in an inlet off the Mississippi River.

Rescuers recovered Melancon's body about an hour later. His blood-alcohol level was 0.24 percent, three times the state's legal limit for driving, said La Crosse County Coroner John Steers.

It was the second consecutive year in which someone has drowned during Oktoberfest in La Crosse. And he is the ninth young man since 1997 to die in the river after a night at the city's bars.

"I still don't believe it," Triplett said Monday. "It really hasn't hit me."

According to Triplett, he and Melancon split up and regrouped a few times while bar-hopping. At 11 p.m., Melancon left him to rejoin his friend from Iraq.

The two had had some beers, but "when Chris left me, he wasn't drunk," Triplett said. "He wasn't drunk at all."

Triplett headed to a friend's apartment and at 12:15 a.m. text-messaged Melancon, instructing him to call if he needed to get into the apartment to sleep or to call the next morning if he was staying elsewhere.

"He never texted me back," Triplett said.

At 4 a.m., Triplett's cell phone rang. It was Melancon's mother. Chris was dead.

"I was shocked," Triplett said. He dressed quickly and headed for the police station.

Police saying little

According to La Crosse police, at about 1:30 a.m., campers at the Pettibone campgrounds heard a splash, saw someone in the water and called 911. A woman who saw Melancon fall into the water and try to swim jumped a fence to try to get to him, but he disappeared, said Jim Hotvedt, a division chief with the La Crosse Fire Department.

Melancon's body was found at 2:23 a.m. in about 8 feet of water in a slough west of the main channel of the river, authorities said. Melancon was about 300 yards out onto the bridge when he apparently fell into the water, Hotvedt said.

In a written statement, Police Chief Edward Kondracki called the incident a tragedy and said Oktoberfest was otherwise "relatively quiet and successful."