A family friend confirmed Thursday that the two people missing after a fishing boat accident July 13 at the Columbia River bar are a 43-year-old Camas man and his 11-year-old son.
Constantin Leahu, his son Andrei Leahu and three friends took a 26-foot boat on a fishing trip in the Pacific Ocean last Saturday, said Irina Negrean, a family friend.
The boy had just turned 11 the day before and had convinced his father to let him go on a fishing trip with his dad for the first time, Negrean said, Negrean said.
The trip turned deadly around 10:30 a.m. when the boat was heading back over the Columbia River bar . The boat “collided with the bar” and capsized, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement.
Two of the people on the boat were pulled out of the water by Good Samaritans in the area and survived. The other person on the boat, John Miller, 65, was pronounced dead at a hospital after Coast Guard rescuers pulled him out of the water.
The Coast Guard searched for the boy and his father for about 11 hours but then suspended the search.
Negrean said she learned about the accident when the pastor of her church called her mother and told her to come to the Leahu household. Negrean and her mother both sat and prayed with Constantin Leahu’s wife, Elena Venera, and their four daughters.
“The family was devastated,” Negrean said. “We held out hope for them to be recovered. And then, as time went on, it just became harder to believe that they could have survived.”
Leahu and his wife are Romanian immigrants, Negrean said. Leahu is a deckbuilder. The oldest of the couple’s five children is 14 years old and the youngest is 2.
Andrei, the second-oldest child, was “incredibly bright, funny and a social butterfly,” a friend wrote on a GoFundMe fundraising page in the family’s name, which as of Thursday evening had drawn more than $63,000 in donations.
“His life was just starting,” Negrean said. “He was a wonderful little boy that was taken much too soon.”
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