Featured Image Credit: CNN
Topics: Texas, Texas floods, US News
Ella Scott
A grieving father whose daughter is currently marked as one of the many missing in the Texas floods has recalled how his search led him to accidentally uncover the body of a young child.
A sudden storm over the July 4 weekend dumped a staggering 15 inches of rain into the Guadalupe River, causing the Texan waterway to rise 26 feet in 45 minutes, as per officials. The Texas floods, from which emergency responders have rescued 850 people, have taken the lives of 82 Texans, with 41 still thought to be missing.
Rescue teams are currently working around the clock to find 10 children and one counsellor who went missing after Camp Mystic - a Christian girls' camp set along the Guadalupe River - was flooded.
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Another person who's still looking for their missing child is worried father Ty Badon.
Badon’s 21-year-old daughter Joyce Badon has not been heard from for days, so the man headed to Hunt, Texas, with her brother to try and find the college-aged woman.
After calling out his daughter’s name, Badon told CNN that he and his son accidentally ‘stumbled’ upon the body of a child.
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It’s understood that the unidentified youngster had been caught in the tragic flash flooding.
“My son and I were walking and I thought it was a mannequin. It was a little boy, 8 or 10 years old, and he was dead,” Badon explained.
“We were just walking, doing the same thing we were doing when we stumbled across him.
“Hopefully we can find our children, my daughter and her friends alive,” he added.
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Badon used the broadcast to ask CNN viewers to ‘pray’ for his family before remarking what a ‘great job’ those working out of Ingram Elementary School are doing amid the adverse weather.
“They’re the place where all the survivors are brought and we were hoping to hear our daughter and friends names call, but they never did call. So, we said ‘we’re going to come out and find them ourselves’.”
The proud father went on to say that his daughter Joyce was a ‘beautiful, wonderful girl’ and that he couldn’t have asked for a ‘better’ child.
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Publications report that Joyce and her three friends, Ella Cahill, Aidan Heartfield and Reese Manchaca, were residing in a house along the Guadalupe River before it burst its banks.
It’s understood that the residence the foursome - who have yet to be found - were staying in is ‘no longer there’.
In a statement shared on Saturday (July 5), Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said: "We continue to have hundreds of first responders on the ground, air and water in the process of search and rescue.”
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Some Texas officials have blamed budget cuts imposed by the Trump administration on the National Weather Service (NWS) for the reason why there was lack of warning regarding the adverse weather.
It’s understood that some positions at local NWS offices in San Angelo and San Antonio were left unfulfilled.
One of these was a warning coordination meteorologist. The person previously in this role reportedly left their position earlier this year after taking an early retirement package offered by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the New York Times reported.
UNILAD has previously contacted the National Weather Service and the White House for further comment.