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NEW SALEM It's hard to see in the tree bushes, a hundred meters north of Highway 218, but it's there: a Hyundai Elantra, hung like a spider's web.
By mid-morning on Monday, as the sun was rising for the first time since Florence had arrived from the coast last week, the soybean field between the road and the stretched sedan seemed to have just left a sprinkler system too long.
Fourteen hours earlier, however, the rains had normally turned calmly at Richardson Creek in a raging monster, carrying water 10 feet above these soybean plants and carrying his young mother Dazia Lee the road, to across the field and in the trees.
The authorities said that Lee and his toddler were traveling from their Charlotte home to visit their family in Wadesboro on Sunday night, and that the highway patrol had laid barricades beyond the Fish Road intersection. .
When she arrived, "I saw people coming in and out," Lee told the WCNC on Monday. "I was about to make a detour, but I stopped and saw cars coming in and out, so I thought (that was okay)."
"I can tell you that the barricades were up there," said Union County Sheriff Eddie Cathey on Monday at a news conference at the New Salem Volunteer Fire Department. "If anyone else has moved those barricades and that she has rolled around, I can not tell."
Police said that around 8 pm Sunday, Lee approached a bridge crossing the creek and tried to continue driving, although the road was partially submerged.
The powerful current then swept the car over the flooded field and into the trees, the police said. Once on site, Lee jumped out of the driver's seat and released Kaiden from her child seat. At that time, most of the car was under water.
"If I understand correctly, she can not swim," said Cathey. "She managed to get out of herself, but she could not land on the floor.
"The water was still on her head and she was struggling."
In tears, shortly after being ripped off the river, Lee told a Fox Charlotte reporter, "I was holding his hand, trying to hold him back, trying to pull him up. And it had come to the point that I could not stand – and he gave up.
Many local and state police departments, as well as an urban search and rescue team from Miami-Dade County, deployed by FEMA, searched the water until midnight, indicated the police. The darkness, the volume and the intensity of the water thwarted them.
They resumed the search at 7:30 am Monday morning, police said.
At that time, the water – whose Sunday night had been several hundred meters (Richardson Creek is normally 30 to 40 feet, from one shore to the other) – had considerably backward. Evidence of its destructive nature remained: of three large dumpsters in a parking lot near the bridge, one was still in place and the other was a few hundred feet downstream. The third? "We do not know or that's the case, "Cathey said.
Closer to where Lee's car had been washed away, much of the asphalt had been eroded in a few hours.
It was one of 28 Union County roads that were deemed impassable and blocked at the height of the storm Sunday, said a county spokesman. "I've worked in this county for 40 years," said Cathey. "I have never seen a flood of this magnitude."
On Monday morning, the television crews arrived before dawn, waiting for the news of young Kaiden. Just after 10 am, as an information helicopter plunged to the ground to document the scene, two rescuers saw the boy's body, under a white sheet, through the soybean fields.
In fact, Kaiden was right next to the car. The darkness and the flood had hidden.
"The child was found … between the vehicle's bumper and the tree," said Miami Fire Chief Joseph Zahralban, USAR team leader. , to the media. "With turbulent water and hydraulics, the water puts a lot of pressure on this vehicle and all around it. Thus, the child was essentially restrained between the vehicle and the tree.
The test clearly affected the first responders.
"As a father myself," said Chad Rorie, deputy fire chief at New Salem, during the press conference, before stopping. He spent several seconds trying to pull himself together, and when he started again, his voice froze. "It's not something we want to go to any day of the week.
Cathey reiterated how tragic the circumstances were, while reminding people to take warnings seriously during extreme weather events. "Driving through the water where roads are closed is dangerous for anyone," he said. "The high water is high water."
But when a reporter asked if Lee would face criminal charges if it was discovered that she was unaware of the barricades, Cathey said it was at the State Highway Patrol, which would investigate.
And while reporters and first responders watched the Hyundai among the trees, some people quietly said that Dazia Lee had probably been punished enough.
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