Rescuers have recovered the body of 2-year-old Jose Matthew Jauregui Jr., who was swept away from his mother during a flash flood Monday night.
Firefighters had been searching the South Platte River for several miles downstream from where the boy was washed away. A construction worker spotted the body just before noon today and called 911.
The boy’s partially submerged body was found on a sandbank in the river near the Franklin Street bridge, north of the National Western Complex and west of Riverside Cemetery on the Denver-Adams County line. The location, just north of Interstate 70, is about 3 to 4 miles from where the boy was washed into the river.
About a dozen of the boy’s relatives arrived at the scene. The boy’s mother, Elsha Guel, was asked to identify the body, after which she began screaming, “I want my baby! I want my baby!”
She then collapsed and was taken to Denver Health Medical Center.
“We’re very grateful that there is closure to this,” said Denver Fire Chief Larry Trujillo at the scene. “But it is a great, great loss,” he said. “The family bringing the mother to the scene brought all this to reality.”
Trujillo said the body was found more quickly than he expected. “We expected to receive (spotting) calls on this for the next couple of months,” he said.
The mother had taken her son for an evening stroll in Rude Park near her Denver home when a thunderstorm erupted around 7 p.m. Monday. Seeking shelter from the hail that began falling, she pushed her son in a stroller into a narrow tunnel for pedestrians and bicycles under a bridge at Decatur Street, just south of West Colfax Avenue. The tunnel also carried the Lakewood Gulch, which drains all of Rude Park and the area to the west.
Authorities said the water in the gulch quickly rose from 6 inches to about 3½ feet. The rushing water wrenched the the child’s stroller away from the mother and carried it toward the swollen South Platte.
Firefighters arrived to rescue Guel, who was clinging to a concrete barrier. When she realized they had not been able to find her son, she let go and was washed about 200 yards down the gulch before firefighters could pull her from the cold, turbulent water.
She was taken to Denver Health Medical Center for treatment of injuries and released Tuesday.
The boy’s stroller was found in the South Platte on Tuesday near 38th Street and Brighton Boulevard, about 1½ miles from where the boy was washed away.
Firefighters had been searching several miles of the river and its banks from the point where the gulch enters the South Platte, south of Invesco Field at Mile High.
Meanwhile, authorities have been unable to find an unidentified young man reportedly carried off by floodwaters at Bible Park in southeast Denver on Monday night. A search has turned up no trace of him, and no disappearance matching his description has been reported to authorities.
