Rescue team’s bodies found
Deaths of 2 men confirmed as toll from hurricane approaches 40
Authorities have confirmed the deaths of two of the four volunteer rescuers who went missing Monday in Greens Bayou when a strong current pushed their boat into power lines, sending a shock through the vessel and tossing its seven occupants overboard.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences said Jorge Perez, 33, and Yahir Rubio Vizuet, 45, had drowned. The Houston Fire Department on Tuesday found their bodies floating in floodwaters, the medical examiner’s office reported.
Relatives said two other men, 33-year-old Benjamin Vizuet and 40-yearold Gustavo Rodriguez, remained missing. A fifth volunteer, Jose Vizuet, was in the hospital.
The group was headed for a wheelchair-bound resident’s home. Their boat was carrying a reporter and photojournalist from Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, which published a firsthand account of the harrowing incident and the 18 hours they spent clinging to trees and branches waiting to be rescued.
“The strong current was carrying the boat towards a
power line. We were about 20 feet from the line and we could hear the transformers blow and see sparks flying,” Daily Mail reporter Alan Butterfield wrote. “I was desperate to get away from the power lines so I jumped out of the boat and so did everyone else. I heard the boat crash into the lines, the noise was just awful. The boat was crackling and smoking.”
Butterfield wrote that he couldn’t see any of the other — they also had jumped into the water.
“I was desperately trying to swim away from the power lines in the water,” he wrote. “I felt electricity in the water, it paralyzes you for a second. How we survived electrocution, I don’t know.”
Butterfield and photographer Ruaridh Connellan were treated at a local hospital.
The two deceased boaters are among nearly 40 people who have died or are feared dead as a result of Hurricane Harvey, which has brought historic flooding to the Houston area. As of 7 p.m. Thursday, the Harris County medical examiner had confirmed 18 deaths alone in the nation’s fourth-largest county.
The victims included Ronald Zaring, 82, who was found unresponsive while riding a charter bus on the Hardy Toll Road.
Friendswood police reported Thursday that Zaring was among Friendswood Health Center patients evacuated on Aug. 27, then cared for at a local high school. The residents were being transported by a strike team to Huntsville on Aug. 29 when Zaring died, police said.
‘Salesman all his life’
Zaring spent his life as a salesman and turned his expertise into second-act entrepreneurship — repairing the devices he previously sold and selling hospitals, school districts and governments on those services. A longtime resident of Sagemont, Zaring had been living in the memory care wing of the nursing home for the last year.
“He was a salesman all his life,” his son, Devin, said by phone. “It just breaks my heart what those people had to go through with their patients for three or four days.”
Friendswood police also confirmed that longtime former Clear Creek High School track and football coach Ruben Jordan, 58, had died in weekend flooding. Police said Thursday that his body was recovered by boat in the 3000 block of West Bay Area Boulevard.
More details also emerged about another flood victim, 89-year-old Agnes Stanley, whose body was found Sunday in 4 feet of water in her one-story brick home in the 4300 block of Meyerwood, close to Brays Bayou.
Stanley was a longtime volunteer with Houston Audubon’s Docent Guild, which develops educational programs at the Edith Moore sanctuary in west Houston. She worked specifically with the Titmouse Club, a program that introduces preschool children to birds and botany to develop their interest in the environment.
“She was devoted, and she loved that kids’ program,” said Helen Drummond, executive director of Houston Audubon. The bird conservation, education and advocacy organization owns 17 sanctuaries in the Houston-Galveston region.
The retired nurse also volunteered at a local Ronald McDonald House, Drummond said.
Stanley took a hiatus from volunteering to care for her husband. Recently widowed, she wanted to return to her work with children.
“She was fierce and determined. She was small in stature but strong-willed and invincible,” Drummond said. “She just meant so much to us and she will definitely be missed.”
In Walker County north of Houston, an 83-year-old woman died earlier this week after her vehicle was caught in floodwaters. Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety told the Associated Press that a state trooper checking the road early Tuesday morning came across Ola Mae Crooks’ vehicle. The trooper contacted the swift water rescue team, which recovered the body.
Crooks apparently drowned after her car was swept off a farm-to-market road at the San Jacinto River near her home, Sgt. Steven McNeil told the Huntsville Item newspaper.
Meanwhile, the family of Jill Renick, a spa manager at the Omni Houston Hotel near the Galleria, anxiously awaited news about her whereabouts.
Relatives said Renick headed Saturday to the hotel, where her car and dog were found. But, as of Thursday, there was apparently no sign of Renick.
The hotel flooded and sustained damage that has shut it down until October.
Authorities said earlier this week they weren’t immediately able to search the hotel because floodwater, contaminated with oil and gas, was too deep.
“The unknown is absolutely killing us right now,” said Renick’s nephew, Austin Miller. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it.”
A Dallas native, Renick moved to Houston in 2015 when she was hired at the Omni. She kept up with friends in Dallas and built a close-knit group of friends in Houston, said her niece, Tina Turk, 32. She and her dog, Sweet Pea, were inseparable.
After talking with her coworkers and friends, Renick’s family believes she decided to stay the night on Saturday at the hotel after a downpour of rain hit the city earlier that day.
Chris Palmquist, reservations supervisor for the Omni, confirmed Tuesday that Renick was missing.
‘We’re praying’
Houston police were called to the hotel on Tuesday about a possible dead person in an elevator, said Gary Norman, a spokesman with Houston’s Office of Emergency Management. But when they searched the elevator on Thursday, they didn’t find a body, Norman added.
It was not immediately clear if officers had searched the rest of the hotel.
In northeast Houston, relatives and friends continued to search for the two missing boaters who had ventured out Monday. A live Facebook feed showed them searching on foot through the brush near Greens Bayou for Vizuet and Rodriguez.
The voice of the videographer pleaded with viewers to help find the missing men.
“It’s just impossible for us to believe,” she said. “We’re praying.”
The woman spoke in the background in English and Spanish, giving the men’s names and dates of birth as well as pleading for viewers to alert the media.
“We pray that they are in a hospital,” she said.