Girl, 8, prayed for help in river
Published: September 3, 2003
‘They’re powerful angels,’ she says.
Amy Aguilar remembers the waves and the current that pulled her out into the Mississippi River.
She remembers the sound of splashing water, so loud that it drowned out the panicked calls from her sisters and cousin who yelled to her from the shoreline. She remembers the foul taste of the water and the stomachache it gave her.
And Amy, 8, remembers praying for angels to take away the water that lapped against her 67-pound, 3-foot, 10-inch body as it drifted helplessly into the dangerous Mississippi River currents.
“It doesn’t matter, they can still help,” the Harvey girl said Tuesday about the objects of her prayers. “They’re powerful angels.”
Her family thinks nothing short of a miracle happened Monday when Amy, who cannot swim, managed to keep her head above water for more than half an hour until a tugboat crew who heard a radio call about her plight pulled her from the river near the Harvey Canal lock.
“How can an 8-year-old survive in water like that?” said Amy’s grandmother, Daisy Valle, 44. “My son, who works on the boats, said that water pushes you and pushes you until you get to the Gulf of Mexico.”
It is not uncommon for people to wade in the Harvey Canal at the river, although the area has a deadly history. In June 2000, a 27-year-old man went under water while trying to swim across the Harvey Canal, and he and his girlfriend’s 21-year-old son, who tried to rescue him, both died.
Amy was released Tuesday morning from West Jefferson Medical Center, where she was held overnight for observation.
Her cousin, Catarina Baizan, 18, was booked with neglect by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office for not keeping closer tabs on the children. Baizan was expected to be released from jail Tuesday afternoon.
Baizan accompanied Amy and two of her sisters, Hilda Aguilar, 9, and Ana Cade, 6, to the west side of the Harvey Canal’s confluence with the Mississippi for a Labor Day picnic Monday afternoon, Daisy Valle said. They were about seven blocks from Valle’s Pailet Street home.
The younger girls played in the Harvey Canal close to the shore at first. Amy said Baizan warned her not to go far, but Hilda urged her sisters to race in the water. Amy said she remembers feeling the sandy bottom. “Then I went further,” Amy said.
“I felt the water pulling me back,” said Amy, a second-grader at Homedale Elementary School. “I was scared. I thought I was going to die, and I saw the boat and I went into the boat.”
That boat was the Custom, whose crew heard a radio call broadcast by a Harvey Canal lock employee who saw Amy drift away from her sisters and into the river. Bystanders on the riverbank saw only Amy’s head above water, not knowing if she was still alive, said Valle, whose husband, Raul Valle, went to the scene after someone who saw Amy called his home.
“He was going crazy,” Daisy Valle said. “Everybody wanted to jump in, but they couldn’t because everyone knows the history of that river.”
Amy “was getting so tired of paddling her little feet and little hands, and the only thing she could say was, ‘God, please don’t let me die,’ ” Daisy Valle said.
Toby Burmaster, a member of the Custom’s crew, said his captains responded to the scene, about two miles upriver from where they had docked at Stone Oil in Gretna. It took the Custom about 15 minutes get to Amy, who was about 1,500 feet from the shore, he said.
“We couldn’t see her at first because of the glare of the sun on the water,” said Burmaster, 30, who lives in Belle Chasse. “We couldn’t see her until we got close. . . . When we (were) able to see her, she was right in front of us. There wasn’t no searching.”
Crew member Andrew Frazier, 32, jumped into the river and grabbed Amy, said Burmaster, who helped both of them into the tugboat. Frazier, a Mississippi resident, could not be reached Tuesday.
“Another 10 minutes, she would have gone under,” Burmaster said. “She would have been gone.”
On the Custom, the crew wrapped Amy in a towel and offered her a drink as they headed toward the Harvey Canal. By that time there were police, firefighters and an ambulance waiting. Amy, who was shivering, was frightened and appeared to be in shock, Burmaster said.
Amy said she did not know how long she was in the river, though she remembers her head going under water “beaucoup times.”
“I was jumping up, and every time I was falling down, I was kicking up,” she said of her dog paddle strokes. “I kept on and on and on, and then I saw the boat.”
Amy’s family had nothing but thanks for the tugboat crew.
“They saved my daughter’s life,” said Emily Aguilar, Amy’s mother. “If it was not for them, she would not be here now with her family.”
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