Two married couples from Honduras were among five adults who drowned in an Ohio river after a desperate attempt to rescue a swimmer in distress — a tragedy that has left one couple’s young children orphaned and stranded in the United States with no surviving relatives nearby, officials and family members said.
Jose Mario Pineda Dias, 33, and his wife, Marina Suyapa Regalad, 28, had taken their two children to the Scioto River on Sunday night, where they were joined by another married couple and an adult friend, according to Honduran authorities.
The group had been spending the evening fishing near the O’Shaughnessy Reservoir when one man went into the water for a swim and suddenly began struggling, Delaware County Sheriff Jeffrey Balzer said.
As the situation escalated, two adults jumped in to help him. When they, too, appeared to be in trouble, two more adults entered the river in an effort to save them, Balzer previously told reporters during a news conference.
Dias, Regalad and the three other adults never made it back out of the water, authorities and relatives said, leaving the couple’s children, ages 8 and 10, without their parents.
Rescuers pulled two women from the river and transported them to hospitals, where they were later pronounced dead. The bodies of three men were recovered from the water on Monday.
Emergency crews were first alerted after a passing driver spotted a visibly distressed child, wearing only a towel, running along a nearby road around 9 p.m. and called 911, officials said.
The frightened child told responding officers that his “family was in the river,” according to police.
Honduran authorities confirmed that four of the five adults who died in the horrifying ordeal were citizens of Honduras, including two married couples.
The second couple and the fifth adult have not yet been identified by authorities.
Flabia Zamora, the director of consular affairs at the Honduran Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Tuesday that they were working with US authorities to bring their bodies home.
Once US officials complete identifying all of the victims, the Central American country will begin the repatriation process, which could take at least a month.
It still remains unclear how the group became swept under the water, which was running high and fast.
The river was flowing at a rate of 350 cubic feet per second on Sunday — more than double the average rate, according to data from a US Geological Survey water gauge at the nearby dam.
A photo taken by a passing boater appeared to show the crew thigh-deep in the river in Powell, north of Columbus, with fishing poles, surrounding a big log.
The two children are currently in the care of Ohio family services, and arrangements will be made to reunite them with their relatives in Honduras.
A relative of the couple, Brenda Raya, has launched a GoFundMe to cover funeral and transportation costs, as well as childcare expenses for the two children.
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