Global Courant
WASHINGTON CROSSING, Pa. – Search teams in Pennsylvania focused on one underwater area on Sunday as they tried to find a 9-month-old boy who had been swept away in a flash flood hours after authorities confirmed his 2-year-old sister’s body had been recovered in the Delaware River.
The Upper Makefield Township Police Department said in a Facebook post on Sunday that while 2-year-old Matilda Sheils was “brought home to her loving family” after her body was recovered Friday, officials are “devastated that we have not yet been able to reunite Conrad with his sister and family.”
Hundreds of people, including search and rescue teams, marine units, and police and fire personnel, searched the area using “K-9s, sonar, drones, boats, divers, heavy equipment, GPS maps and aerial units,” police said, adding that they were now at the point that “our search will depend on the state of the river.”
Authorities have focused their efforts on an area near where the flooded creek enters the Delaware River, and plan to deploy divers where possible and also place K-9 units on islands in the river as water levels fall. Agencies in the south will also monitor their sections along the river, police said.
“We have no words to describe how we feel, other than really heartbroken. But the pain we feel is nothing close to what these families have been through,” the police statement said, promising the missing boy “we will never stop until we can get you home.”
Matilda Sheils and Conrad Sheils.Upper Makefield Township PD via Facebook
The girl’s body was found in the river early Friday night near a wastewater treatment plant in Philadelphia, about 30 miles from where she was. carried away, authorities said Friday night. The Philadelphia medical examiner completed an investigation on Saturday and “decided that Matilda Sheils’ cause of death was drowning and the manner in which it happened was an accident,” an office spokesman said.
The family from Charleston, South Carolina, was visiting relatives and friends in the area and was on their way to a barbecue on the evening of July 15 when their vehicle was hit by a “wall of water” from Houghs Creek, according to Upper Makefield Fire Chief Tim Brewer.
The children’s father, Jim Sheils, grabbed hold of the couple’s 4-year-old son, while their mother, 32-year-old Katie Seley, and a grandmother grabbed hold of the other children, Brewer said. Sheils and the older boy managed to get to safety, but Seley and the grandmother were swept away along with the younger children. The grandmother survived, but the mother perished.
Four other people drowned in the suburb about 35 miles (60 kilometers) north of Philadelphia, according to the Bucks County coroner’s office: Enzo Depiero, 78, and Linda Depiero, 74, of Newtown; Yuko Love, 64, of Newtown; and Susan Barnhart, 53, of Titusville, New Jersey.
