Re: Niggers drown mo' dan YT
Nigs be haunted....by the water...
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People remain haunted by drownings
By Todd C. Frankel, Shane Graber and Elizabethe Holland
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
07/11/2006
Terrell Craig, 15, left, stands in front of the makeshift memorial Tuesday morning that is growing outside of the Dream Center.
The cries for help cut along the riverbank and shattered the summer calm.
Joseph Miller, 16, was slipping under the water. He yelled and fought the Meramec River as it pulled him farther from shore.
A former lifeguard heard the shouts. So did a woman walking with her husband on a nearby trail. Terrell Craig, 15, thought his friend was playing around. Then Terrell's cousin said Joseph couldn't swim. The smiles they'd worn while eating barbecue and playing football during a celebratory church out
ing disappeared.
"A perfect day," as Terrell described it, was over.
(Yes it was. )
Within two minutes, five children, including four siblings, would slip under the water and drown.
Three witnesses provided detailed accounts, corroborated by authorities, of what happened Sunday at Castlewood State Park. Each tried to change the tragic course of that day. They remain haunted by what they saw, what they did and what seemed impossible to do.
"I still don't understand how it happened," Terrell said. "I don't think it was meant to be understood."
Group outing
About 3 p.m. Sunday, three vans from the St. Louis Dream Center pulled into the state park in Ballwin. The outing was a reward for volunteers at the North St. Louis interdenominational church founded by the televangelist Joyce Meyer. Some kids from the neighborhood joined them. Police have said there were 50 children and 10 adults at the outing.
They
ate ribs, garlic biscuits, collard greens and
corn on the cob. They played football. They hiked a two-mile trail. About 6 p.m., they jumped in the river to cool off.
The boys stripped down to swim trunks, piling their clothes on the beach, Terrell said. Most of the girls wore street clothes. They were careful to never go beyond the knee-deep water. Some of the adults from the Dream Center watched. Other visitors to the river fished and swam nearby. After a half-hour, it was time to go. So the adults walked down the beach to gather the children's clothes.
Instantly, Joseph was in trouble. He seemed to lose his footing and was pulled by the river's current. Within seconds, he was 20 yards away and in the middle of the Meramec.
He shouted for help.
Two teens from the Dream Center tried to reach Joseph, Terrell said. One of them grabbed him, but the panicked 16-year-old pushed away. The other teen, Damon Johnson, 17, did not know how to swim, and he too disappeared under the water.
From the beach, Dana Johnson, 13, saw that her brother Damo
n was in trouble. She walked out and suddenly was swept to where Joseph struggled to stay afloat.
As first one and then another of their friends fell into danger, several children waded into the river. Terrell was one of them. Damon's other siblings would also go out: Ryan Mason, 14, and Bryant Barnes, 10. So would Deandre Sherman, 16.
Less than a minute had passed.
Joseph's shouts reached Barbara Collins, the former lifeguard, as she sat on the beach watching her 6- and 11-year-old sons play. Her husband fished from the opposite bank.
"Did that sound for real?" Collins, 31, asked her husband.
She ran down the beach, telling her children to stay out of the water.
She saw kids trapped in the middle of the river, or barely keeping their heads afloat closer to shore. Collins, who swam for Hazelwood High School and now works as an assistant Lutheran church youth director, jumped in and began to swim.
She swam toward a boy. His eyes were barely above the water.
"I'm going to touch you,"
Collins told him. "Don't pull me under."
He forced himself higher in the water, but he was exhausted. Collins grabbed the boy across the chest and began swimming for the shore.
Teens pulled from water
Terry Meza, 50, of Manchester, heard the cries while strolling with her husband on a nearby trail. She walked to the riverbank and shouted to the children in the water. She kicked off her sandals and trudged into the water in a tank top and skirt. The shin-deep mud felt like quicksand but she kept going toward the middle of the river, where she couldn't touch bottom.
Collins, holding the boy across his chest, handed him off to Meza.
It was Joseph.
He was alive.
Holding the boy in one arm and swimming with the other, Meza fought the current. At one point she thought, "It's too much for me."
But she delivered Joseph to shore.
Then Collins shouted that she'd found another teen.
Her husband, another man - perhaps a Dream Center staffer, Collins thought - and Meza helped.
It was D
amon. The boy's body was limp. They pulled him in.
On the beach, Collins, who is trained in CPR, began doing chest compressions. Her husband and the other man alternated giving the boy mouth-to-mouth.
Collins saw teenagers all around her praying on the beach.
Paramedics eventually arrived on the scene and rushed Damon to the hospital.
Six teens had gone missing in the river. One was alive. One was clinging to life.
The others were unaccounted for.
Terrell and his brother tried saving two little boys, reaching one of them and pulling him to safety.
The other, Bryant, 10, never made it.
"He slipped out of our hands," Terrell said.
Dana and Ryan would also perish, and their older brother, Damon, would die at the hospital.
Little Bryant, as he was called, was the youngest victim.
Terrell guessed that Bryant, who did not know how to swim, jumped in the water after the older teens.
"He just followed the big boys," Terrell said.
Terrell, tired and cramping as he tried to pluck
one more life from the waters, nearly drowned, too.
In the chaos and confusion of so many children in trouble, rescuers did not realize that Deandre was missing. They discovered he had drowned only when they spotted his blue button-up shirt and black Nikes still waiting on the beach.
Rescuers unnerved
On Tuesday, Terrell struggled to comprehend how so much happened so fast. And how it could've been even worse. "It could've been all of us," he said.
Collins was still shaken by what she'd seen.
"There was too much loss," she said. "I'm so thankful the one boy was OK. But the weight of the others is too heavy. That doesn't go away."
Meza couldn't get Damon out of her mind.
"I held that boy," she said.
The next day, Meza, a recovering alcoholic who stopped drinking five months ago, attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Her friends reassured her that the situation might have been worse if she'd still been drinking. Maybe she wouldn't have been at the park. Maybe she wouldn't h
ave jumped in the water.
Still, the pictures of what happened won't leave her mind.
"I just keep thinking, 'I should've run faster, I should've swam faster, I should've gone out for another one,'" she said. "A boy died. I did everything to save him, and I didn't."
But there was a moment of solace. Late Sunday night, after the drownings, Meza went to St. John's Mercy Hospital. She stopped in Joseph's room.
"Thank you for saving me," he told her.
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