Torrential night takes tragic turn for victims
On Monday evening, 85-yearold Shirley Alter was sitting in her car with her husband and daughter outside her son’s Meyerland home, waiting for him to arrive back from the high school graduation they had all just attended.
It was raining, hard. And it kept coming. The couple’s son didn’t show up. So they waited, and the rain kept coming, so hard now that it flooded the street, trapping them, like so many Houstonians that night, and forcing them to spend the night in their car.
By morning, as water levels in nearby Brays Bayou continued to rise, and with still no sign of their son and brother, the family called 911 and waited until they were picked up by a Houston Fire Department rescue boat.
Minutes later, en route to dry land, the boat capsized, sending Alter, her 87-year-old husband, their daughter and another man who also had been rescued plunging into the rushing waters.
Alter’s daughter was able to reach shore safely and another HFD boat fished the two rescuers out of the water, but her parents and the other man were swept away in the floodwaters. Her mother’s body was found in a tree hours later. Her father is still missing and presumed dead, although the family clings to hope he may still be alive.
In all, at least seven people
died as a result of Monday night’s historic downpour and flooding.
On Wednesday, Rory Alter, the couple’s eldest son, recounted the drama and the tragic outcome of the rescue. The family said they did not want the elder Alter or his daughter identified.
He said the family that night had attended a graduation ceremony downtown, after which he was to follow his parents back to his house. But it started raining heavily, and he got stuck in a parking garage.
He said his sister told him all of the passengers in the boat were wearing life jackets. The motor suddenly died, he said, while heading for dry land. A rescuer on board was able to restart the motor, but the boat flipped for an unknown reason before it was able to pick up speed. His sister floated several blocks down the swollen bayou before she was able to reach the shore and flag down another boat to take her to safety.
“She was in the water a short time before she realized the life vest was no longer on her,” Alter said. “She does not know how it came off. She was extremely lucky.”
Her parents were not. Neither was the other man in the boat, a stranger identified as Anh Phan Nguyen, whose body later was found at 1700 Holcombe.
“I think if I had been standing there, I’d have gotten on that boat, too,” Alter said. “You think you are being rescued and that everything will be fine. There were hundreds of successful rescues yesterday. It just happened that (theirs) was not one of them.”
On Wednesday, more details emerged about the deaths of the five other people who lost their lives in the storm.
The body of Christopher Kirby, 35, was found in his car after it had been towed out of high water in the 1700 block of Studewood.
His wife, Hanna Kirby, 30, said her husband worked as an independent IT consultant, especially helping local bars with tech support. He had left home around 7 p.m. Monday to go to work at a bar in the Heights area. He left work around 1:45 a.m. Eighteen minutes later, he called her — but never left a message.
She didn’t find out what had happened to him until Tuesday night, after filing a missing person’s report.
“I love him and miss him,” Kirby said. “He loved his family, his friends, his work. He was an allaround happy, good guy.”
Also among the victims was Dennis Callihan, 65, who was found dead Tuesday on the West Loop South, near Eastman Street.
Callihan, a longtime oil executive with Merichem Co., had been trapped in high water, and after pushing his own vehicle out of the water, went to help another motorist, said his son Michael, 35.
“My dad basically overexerted himself,” Callihan said.
First responders told him that soon after, he and other stranded motorists went to a nearby shelter, where his father collapsed. Paramedics unsuccessfully tried to revive him.
“It was really hard for me these last couple days,” Callihan said.
“He was always there for me … and I couldn’t be there for him those last few breaths. It really hurts me.”
Heather Sullivan, Callihan’s 37-year-old daughter, said her father had been a doting grandfather. She had seen her dad just days before, after graduating from the University of Houston-Downtown, 13 years after she first started her college career.
“I could see it in his face, that he was so proud,” she said, adding that her dad had been the inspiration for her to pursue her own career in the oil industry.