BRANSON, Mo. — “Grab the baby!”
Those were the last words Tia Coleman recalls her sister-in-law yelling before the tourist boat they were on capsized in stormy weather and sank into a Missouri lake, killing 17 people, including nine of Coleman’s family members.
A huge wave hit, scattering passengers on the vessel known as a duck boat into Table Rock Lake near Branson, Coleman said, recounting the ordeal from a hospital bed. When the Indianapolis woman came up for air, she was alone. She prayed.
“I said, ‘Jesus please keep me, just keep me so I can get to my children,’” Coleman told television station KOLR.
She spotted a rescue boat and swam as fast as she could.
Coleman’s husband and three children, ages 9, 7 and 1; her 45-year-old sister-in-law and 2-year-old nephew; her mother-in-law and father-in-law and her husband’s uncle all died Thursday night in the deadliest accident of its kind in nearly two decades.
Others killed included a Missouri couple who had just celebrated a birthday; another Missouri couple who were on what was planned as their last extended vacation; an Illinois woman who died while saving her granddaughter’s life; an Arkansas father and son; and a retired pastor who was the boat’s operator.
Branson Mayor Karen Best said Bob Williams, 73, the boat driver, was known by many as “Captain Bob” and was a “great ambassador” for the city. “He was at every event. He knew everyone. He was always promoting Branson,” Best said.
Williams’ family in Rhode Island, where he’d lived for decades before retiring to Branson, remembered him as a deeply religious man who founded a local church.
“Pastor Bob was a prince of a man, loving, kind and generous, whose loss to our family is incalculable,” said Williams’ son-in-law, Bishop Jeffery Williams, who now leads King’s Cathedral in Providence.
“I truly believe in my heart that he died trying to save those people,” one of Williams’ neighbors, Charlie “Ray” Revill, said at a vigil Friday night. “Bob Williams was the finest man I’ve ever known.”
Others killed included 65-year-old William Bright and his 63-year-old wife, Janice. The couple had recently celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary and had talked about Branson being one of their last big trips, recalled neighbor Barbara Beck.
The couple moved to Higginsville from Kansas City, Missouri, three years earlier to be closer to a daughter and grandchildren and quickly embraced small-town life.
William Bright’s final public Facebook posting noted the wedding anniversary and how happy he was with his wife, three kids and 16 grandchildren. Life, he wrote, had “been a lot of fun.”
Another Missouri couple killed in the accident were 69-year-old William Asher and 68-year-old Rosemarie Hamann. The St. Louis-area couple had been celebrating Hamann’s birthday earlier in the week. In a final Facebook photo posted by Hamann, he’s sticking his tongue out and she’s smiling.
“I can only imagine what they were going through. They were so in love. It’s just heartbreaking,” said friend Russ McKay, who said talked to Hamann the day before the accident.
State and federal investigators were trying to determine what sent the vessel, originally built for military use in World War II, to its demise.
An initial assessment blamed thunderstorms and winds that approached hurricane strength, but it wasn’t clear why the amphibious vehicle even ventured into the water.