PASSENGER RECALLS EVENTS AFTER BOATING ACCIDENT

About 15 minutes before Teresa Jaco, her son and three friends were plunged into the Mississippi River, she remarked how God would be watching out for them.

Her watch, encircled with designs of guardian angels, is still frozen at 9:55 p.m. She says that is how she knows when the 15-foot boat she was riding in Saturday struck an unlighted barge, capsized, and sent the five under water.

Four came up. On Wednesday, rescue crews from the Cape Girardeau Fire Department and Missouri Water Patrol were still looking for the fifth, Ricky Wright, 42.

"He became a grandpa this weekend and he didn't even know it," Jaco said.

"He has got an 18-month-old boy who will never know his daddy."

The five had spent the day on the river and ran out of gasoline before they were able to return to Trail of Tears State Park. They decided to let the current carry them to Honker's Boat Dock, where they would be able to get gasoline.

The lights on the boat were on so that any other watercraft could see them, Jaco said. Their unplanned float had not unnerved them.

Wright was the first to see the unlighted barge, Jaco said. He called out for his friends to brace themselves just as the boat struck the barge sideways.

Everyone, including Jaco's 11-year-old son, were pushed under the barge by the 25-mile-an-hour current, she said.

As Sherry Lee came up on the other side of the barge she was able to grab a rope, Jaco said. Jaco also grabbed a rope, then swung a leg high enough to get a foothold on the barge to pull herself up as Lee pushed her out of the water.

Jaco then tried to pull Lee out of the water.

"She was screaming 'I can't make it,'" Jaco said. "I screamed back "You've got to make it, we've got children.'"

But Lee could not hold on and went down into the water.

Jaco then began crying out the names of the other four. She heard a man's voice yelling and later found out it was Tim Everett, another friend who had been in the boat. But Everett could not hear her. His foot was caught on a mooring cable, and he could not pull himself out.

He bobbed in and out of the river, and the water rushing around his head drowned out Jaco's voice, she said.

Everett was finally saved by firefighters.

Jaco made attempts to get off the barge where she was stranded. She tried to climb off using a cable that was tied to a permanent dock but fell back into the river, she said. Jaco had just enough strength to climb back onto the barge, where firefighters found her.

Her son was able to swim and float downriverto a point just beyond Honker's Boat Dock. A man discovered the boy walking along railroad tracks headed in the direction of the accident. Jaco said he was trying to find his mother.

Lee was discovered as she floated by the boat dock. Light reflected off her eyeglasses, which didn't fall off her face in the accident.

Altogether, not one of them was in the water for more than 10 minutes, Jaco said.

If firefighters were willing to move more of the barges around the Cape Girardeau Sand Co. dock operations, they would find Wright, she said.

Only the barge that the boat had struck was moved in an effort to locate Wright, Jaco said.

"I would bet my paycheck for the next 50 years that he is under one of them," she said. "But the firefighters say it is not probable."