Clinging to her drowning ‘Mama,' little girl survives raging Texas flood

HOUSTON - Shivering from hypothermia, little Jordyn Grace was clutching her mother’s unresponsive body as the floodwaters rose around her. A rescue team in a Zodiac boat, on the lookout for those in distress in Beaumont, Texas, spotted the small pink backpack the girl was wearing and pulled her and her mother aboard.

“Mama was saying her prayers,” the 3-year-old, recovering Wednesday in a Beaumont hospital, told a relative, Antionette Logan, 38.

“Jordyn told me they were in the yucky water for quite a while,” Logan said. “It’s a tragedy that her mama died, but it’s a miracle that Jordyn survived.”

With the death toll from Hurricane Harvey climbing to 38, those who survived the storm are just now learning the names of those who did not and the terrible ways in which they died. Some episodes are particularly haunting, like the tale of Jordyn and her mother Colette Sulcer, 41, a nurse who died Tuesday in the flooding in Beaumont, about 100 miles from waterlogged Houston, as her daughter clung to her body.

Most of the victims identified so far also drowned: Agnes Stanley, 89, who was found floating in 4 feet of water inside her Houston home, where she lived alone; Alexander Sung, 64, a clockmaker in South Houston, who died in his beloved store after trying to rescue merchandise; Joshua Feuerstein, 33, who the police said drove around a barricade, a fatal mistake. Sgt. Steve Perez, 60, a veteran police officer in Houston, drove into a flooded underpass on his way to the station.

Then there were the deaths of Manuel Saldivar, 84, and Belia Saldivar, 81, and their four great-grandchildren: Daisy, 6; Xavier, 8; Dominic, 14; and Devy, 16, who were found in a partly submerged van in Greens Bayou.

The couple’s son, Sammy Saldivar, was driving the van and managed to escape through a window, watching helplessly as it disappeared under the water. The authorities were first alerted to the van around 10 a.m. Sunday when they heard the screams of Saldivar, who was clinging to a tree after climbing through the partly open driver’s side window.

Harvey killed in other ways too. In Montgomery County, Lisa Jones, 60, had just lain down for a nap in her bedroom when a tree fell through the roof, crushing her. Her husband was in the living room, helpless to reach her through the debris until firefighters arrived.

In a region where it is difficult to find a person without a harrowing story to tell, the story of Jordyn, the 3-year-old who saw her mother die, moved all who heard it. But it hit hardest within the large Beaumont family of nurses, pastors and military veterans who were relatives of Sulcer.

Sulcer, a surgical nurse, and her only daughter had tried to escape the flooding Tuesday in their car, taking a service road of Interstate 10. But the water caught up with them.

Relatives described Sulcer as a dedicated nurse who had entered the profession after the death years ago of her mother, who was also a nurse.

“We’re a service family that takes pride in giving back to our community,” said Logan, also a nurse.

Logan said she and others in the family often referred to Sulcer by a nickname, Nan Nan, adding that she enjoyed caring for her daughter, traveling, watching cooking shows and listening to music.

Sulcer had recently driven to Houston to attend a concert of British singer Ed Sheeran and had kept in touch with relatives and friends through social media, texting and phone calls. She kept them updated Tuesday about efforts to escape the flooding. Then the messages suddenly stopped.

“We’re in absolute shock,” said Vanessa Jackson, 58, a cousin who is a retiree in Beaumont. “You hear about stories like this in other places, other people’s lives. Not here, not us.”

The goal now was to calm a traumatized child. “We just need to be focused now on little Jordyn, who experienced something none of us should,” Jackson said.

Another cousin, Sylvia Allison, 24, described Jordyn as “the only girl in our family of all boys, our lil tomboy at its finest.” In a post on Facebook, Allison expressed her grief, saying, “Our special little miracle, you survived all that water for hours holding on to my cousin.”

“I’m really having a hard time understanding today right now,” she wrote.

Michael LaBouef, a longtime friend of Sulcer’s who worked with her at the Medical Center of Southeast Texas in Port Arthur, said that the tragedy devastated the staff at the 224-bed hospital.

“I always called her baby girl,” said LaBouef, a retired surgical assistant. “Her smile, I mean, the room just lit up. You couldn’t help but smile back.”

“I never did see that girl in a bad mood,” he continued. “I never saw her upset or mad. And she didn’t have the life of leisure that would give her such a positive attitude. But she built on her adversity instead of letting it knock her down.”

Co-workers at the hospital had been in touch with Sulcer on Tuesday morning as the rains were battering Beaumont. “And one time she said, well, it looks like the weather is going to break, and we’re going stir crazy so we’re going to go out,” LaBouef said.

The Beaumont Police Department said that Sulcer and her daughter pulled into a parking lot when the waters began to rise and then left their car. At some point, the police said, they were swept into a canal and ended up floating about half a mile.

At that point, it was too late for Sulcer. But even as she succumbed to the floodwaters, she never let go of her daughter.

Her friends kept on trying to contact her, LaBouef said, but “they got no answer.”