A family fishing trip ended in tragedy Tuesday afternoon when a
man and a woman drowned in Coyote Creek while trying to save two
children who had fallen into the swift stream.
SAN JOSE – A family fishing trip ended in tragedy Tuesday afternoon when a man and a woman drowned in Coyote Creek while trying to save two children who had fallen into the swift stream.
The dead man was the 47-year-old father of a girl, age 10 and boy, 12, who slipped into the fast-moving water. The female victim was a 22-year-old friend of the family according to San Jose Fire Capt. Karen Allyn. The children were uninjured.
Names of the drowning victims were withheld pending notification of next of kin. They were all San Jose residents.
The party was fishing along the bank of the creek in south San Jose just west of U.S. 101 when the children fell into the water, said San Jose Police Department Public Information Officer Gina Tepoorten. The area has steep edge adjacent to the creek, Allyn said.
“If you are standing at the edge of the water there, it is very deceptive,” she said. “It has very slippery, treacherous footing there.”
The father and woman jumped in to save the children and managed to help them ashore where another adult was waiting to pull them out. But when he turned around, the man and woman were gone.
Although only several feet deep, authorities believe the current from Coyote creek was too strong for the adults to stop from being taken under and swept into a nearby fishing lake.
“The adults were seen going into the water and weren’t seen after that,” Tepoorten reported.
A witness told the authorities that the father was a fair swimmer, the woman less so, and it is possible the clothes they were wearing, along with the current, pulled them under, Allyn said.
San Jose Fire Department’s swift water rescue team and sheriffs office divers recovered the woman’s body at 3:30 p.m. and the man’s about an hour later in 15 feet of water not far from where they vanished at approximately 1:30 p.m.
The children, who were uninjured, were picked up by their mother.