Police and family search for missing man
Andreas Pfenning was goose hunting along the Nith River
WILMOT TOWNSHIP — Police and family continue to search for Andreas Pfenning, who went goose-hunting just steps from his New Hamburg home along the Nith River Monday afternoon, and didn’t return.
Cambridge firefighters used their hovercraft in the river Monday with the help of township volunteer firefighters.
On Tuesday, officers with Waterloo Regional Police walked the banks of the river as the Ontario Provincial Police’s drone flew over the river in the area of Christner Road.
“We are in shock,” said Andreas’ cousin, Barbara Pfenning. “It doesn’t seem real yet.”
Pfenning was out searching the banks as were other family members, including Andreas’ two younger brothers who haven’t stopped looking. They were out in canoes Tuesday morning.
“You can’t sit inside. That would make you crazy,” said the Conestoga College student.
Staff Sgt. Steve Dalrymple of the special response unit for local police said Andreas Pfenning was last seen around noon.
The 24-year-old man, who works at the family farm, Pfen-
ning Organic Vegetables Inc., sent a text to his girlfriend on Monday afternoon to say he was leaving work early to head out hunting alone.
When he didn’t return home for dinner, family and friends got worried and went looking for him and at the river’s edge, found his clothing, a firearm and a goose carcass, Dalrymple said.
“He may have retrieved an object in the river and fallen in and was carried with the current,” Dalrymple said.
Police said the river is unusually high at this time of the year, and despite receding water levels, the river remains high — six feet in some locations.
“It’s turbid and difficult to see more than two inches into the water,” Dalrymple said.
Police are searching an area of the river about nine kilometres long.
They planned to be out until dark.
“It can be treacherous water and then it becomes dangerous,” Dalrymple said.
Police will gather again on Wednesday and “reassess and take the search into a different phase,” he said. An OPP dive team could be in the river on Wednesday.
“We are treating it as a recovery,” Dalrymple said.
Pfenning’s uncle, Wolfgang Pfenning, said police, family and friends searched along the river through the night.
“We walked half the night around here trying to find if he held on to a branch,” he said. “He must have fallen in.
“The river has a fast current; it’s four feet higher than normal,” he said, adding that in the summer the river can drop to knee-level.
But at this time of year, it can swell as high as your chest and be filled with debris, he said.
Wolfgang said his nephew is familiar with the river that the family home sits alongside. He grew up there and was an avid hunter.
“He is not unfamiliar with this territory,” he said.
“He must have underestimated the elements.”
Pfenning grew up around the river, working on his family’s organic farm that was started outside New Hamburg in 1981, after his parents immigrated from Germany.
Co-worker and friend Victoria O’Reilly said Andreas and his two younger brothers had returned from a trip to Jamaica on Friday.