6-year-old falls into creek while playing and is still missing days later, officials say
_fitted%20(1).png "Six-year-old Lin’ajah Brooker was playing with two other children Saturday, March 23, when she fell into a creek that leads to the Delaware River, officials say.")
Officials are searching for a girl who fell into a creek while playing over the weekend in Pennsylvania.
Six-year-old Lin’ajah Brooker was playing with two other children Saturday, March 23, when she fell into a creek that leads to the Delaware River in Chester, authorities told WTXF.
“My emotions are all off hinge. I haven’t had sleep. I can’t eat. The only thing I’m thinking about is finding her,” Lin’ajah’s grandmother, Kimberly Richardson, told WPVI.
Lin’ajah fell into the creek around 7 p.m., and fire crews searched for her until it got dark, then the Coast Guard used a helicopter and boat to search through the night, officials said during a March 24 news conference streamed by LiveNOW from Fox.
On Sunday afternoon, officials shifted the efforts from a search and rescue to a recovery search.
“We were always hopeful that we could find something, but now there’s just without a doubt, once we had the sunlight on our side, and we’re able to do a much more thorough search, that it wasn’t going to be a rescue, it was going to be a recovery,” Chester Fire Commissioner John-Paul Shirley said during the news conference.
Lin’ajah’s aunt, Tyeesha Reynolds, told WPVI other kids tried to save Lin’ajah when she went into the water.
“My 7-year-old daughter tried to hold her and she was holding onto my daughter’s coat and I guess the wind took her,” Reynolds told the outlet. “My nephew, he’s 19, he jumped in the water. My 12-year-old nephew jumped into the water.”
The search continued into Monday, March 25, according to WTXF.
Chester is about a 15-mile mile drive southwest of Philadelphia.
