Family and friends of 2-year-old Hunter Beaupre and 13-year-old Austin Fuda had kept up an anxious vigil for days.
They milled around a memorial set up some 80 yards from the bend in the river where the car carrying the boys had come to rest four feet below the surface since shortly after plunging off Green River Road Friday morning.
All day Tuesday they waited for news from the King County Sheriff’s office, whose dive team was struggling against the current and battling exhaustion to recover the car. Authorities had decided not to pull the car out Friday because of the danger the strong current posed to divers. By Saturday the situation was even worse.
No one knew whether the boys would be found inside or whether the river had swept them away. Everybody hoped they would be found inside so grieving families could begin to find closure.
“It’s unknown whether a tree went through the windshield or what kind of damage has been done to the car,” said Matt Duffey, a close friend of the Beaupre family. “There’s so much unknown and so much tension that it’s a matter of, ‘OK, sure, they are going to be bringing the car out, but they’ve got to make sure the boys are in there as well. If not, it’s not over.’ Three days have passed without anything really being done at all.”
Hours passed, with periodic updates relayed to chaplains, who passed the word on. Successive divers were having a hard time getting a strap through and around the car so the recovery team could fasten it to cables and lift it out.
When the team finally got the battered 2001 Volkswagen out, they found the toddler still buckled to his car seat. But Fuda was missing.
That was not the news family and friends had hoped, wept, and prayed for.
“It’s not fair that one family has their child back and one does not,” said Curt Beaupre, Hunter Beaupre’s uncle.
The recovery team prepared to search the river for Fuda using boats and pole cameras.
“…What we have to do now is search the river until we find the second victim,” said Sgt. John Urquhart, spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office. “We have to do it by nightfall if we are going to do it today. The river is going to go up. It’s going to be much more difficult after today. We’ll keep looking as best we can depending on the river flows, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
“…It’s very disheartening. We had hoped to be able to bring some closure to the family by finding both victims inside the car, but unfortunately, there was only one. That’s a shame. Everybody is pretty down (at the dive site) right now,” Urquhart said.
Urquhart said the river’s speed made the recovery extremely difficult.
“We had to go through three divers. The first two were exhausted. They got partial straps on the car, and the third diver was able to finish off so we could pull it to the shore and onto the roadway,” Urquhart said.
The 16-year-old-girl who had been driving lost control of the car about 8:30 Friday and went into the river north of the Auburn Municipal Golf Course. She escaped but tried to rescue the boys as the roiling waters swept the car downstream.
Duffey said it does not appear the girl was speeding but may have lost control on the leaf-covered road.
Curt Beaupre said the girl told him she had tried to get the toddler out and thought that Austin would be able to escape on his own through an open window. She made it ashore and flagged down a passerby who called 911. Doctors treated her at Auburn Regional Medical Center and released her.
“She tried to save them and couldn’t. We really don’t know any other circumstances, other than that Austin was starting to come out of the car and went back in, and we are assuming it was to unbuckle the baby,” said Duffey.
Urquhart said when divers found the car its doors were open, but the vehicle had sustained too much damage for anyone to say for certain whether the older boy had managed to get out. In the intervening days, the river moved the car around, he said, the windshield was gone and there was no way to tell how much damage it had sustained during the act of lifting.
“We broke out the windows on the doors so we could put straps through the doors and closed the doors when the tension was placed on the straps. The reason we did that was to give the car more structural integrity before we pulled it out of the water. You can imagine the car is heavy enough, but fill the car up with water and it’s really heavy. We didn’t want to rip the roof off that car as we pulled it out,” Urquhart said.
Meanwhile, friends and family were left with a sense of terrible loss.
“Hunter was the sweetest boy,” said Jodelle Groves, a cousin of Hunter’s mother, Dori Beaupre. “I had the privilege of being there since the time he was born, and he was just loved so much. Dori was an amazing mom. He was this perfect, beautiful baby. He loved airplanes, playing Ninja, karate chopping.”
Casey Mundell, Hunter’s cousin and Austin’s stepbrother, said Fuda was a gregarious and thoughtful boy.
“Austin was always talking, always trying to talk to somebody, always worried about everybody, wanted his mom to quit smoking, wanted everybody to be really careful. Both were really sweet and innocent,” said Mundell.
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