DARRINGTON, Wash. - Days after risking his own life and defying arrest by joining the search for Washington state mudslide victims in a vast, mucky debris field, Dayn Brunner retrieved the body of the person he had been looking for most - his sister.
Brunner, 42, recounted the tragic coincidence in an interview with Reuters on Friday, two days after it unfolded on the enormous mound of mud and rubble left by last Saturday's disaster, which has claimed at least 26 lives and left 90 people still missing.
Brunner said he was on the mud pile near Oso, Wash., on Wednesday afternoon when other rescue workers found a blue object and called him over to the spot. It was the same color as the car his sister, Summer Raffo, 36, was known to have been driving through the area when the slide struck.
Brunner, a police officer from Tulalip Bay, Wash., told his teenage son, with whom he had been working as a volunteer member of the search team, to brace himself what they were about to see.
"He said he'd been preparing himself for five days," Brunner recalled.
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As they approached, he saw the body of his sister, still mired from the neck down in mud, seated in the driver's seat of her car.
After an hour of additional digging, Brunner pulled her out by the torso and laid her body out on a tarp. It appeared that she had suffered a blow to the head, but her body was intact.
"She's the most pristine person that's come out of this," he said. "We know she didn't suffer. She most likely never saw it coming."
Soon after the recovery, Raffo's body was flown away by a helicopter. She has since been identified by the medical examiner's office, Brunner said, but it was not immediately certain whether Raffo was among the victims officially counted among the dead as of Friday.
Brunner took Thursday off but returned to the pile on Friday, and said he would keep going back until all those members of the community he was searching with had found their loved ones.
"You can find parts of people, and you can find people that obviously experienced a lot of trauma to their bodies," he said. "You can tell that someone had suffocated, some people had been tossed around pretty good and hit by other objects."
Brunner said the family was planning a funeral toward the end of next week for his sister, who worked as a horse ferrier and was on her way to a friend's farm when a rain-soaked hillside along Highway 530 collapsed and cascaded across the river and roadway below, swallowing dozens of homes and vehicles.
Brunner had joined the early search on Saturday, despite the dangerous conditions posed by quicksand-like conditions, the risk of further slides and authorities who were trying to keep volunteers out of the area by threatening to arrest them.
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On Tuesday, officials finally agreed to allow many community members to join official rescue teams working to find survivors in the dangerous rubble. No further signs of life have been detected.
The death toll from the mudslide appeared poised to climb dramatically as rescue teams drenched by steady rains on Friday clawed through thick muck searching for more victims.
While fire officials directing search operations at the disaster site have spoken of making slow but steady progress in recovering remains of victims buried in the slide, the tally of the dead has changed little in recent days, even as the number of those listed as missing has held steady.
The apparent discrepancy appeared related to a methodical protocol being followed by Snohomish County emergency management officials and medical examiners.
County authorities say coroners have examined and identified the remains of 17 people, including an infant whose body was retrieved on Thursday, and they are the only ones counted so far in the official death toll.
Officials have previously said that remains of nine more individuals have been located in the square-mile heap of mud-caked debris and muck, but as of Friday they had been excluded from the formal tally of lives lost.
County officials have insisted on revising that list only as each set of remains goes through the painstaking process of being examined and identified by coroners, leaving the media and the public at large mostly in the dark about the retrieval of more bodies.
But word of additional remains being located and recovered has been trickling out to family members of the missing and dead through word-of-mouth and other channels, as many community members were working side-by-side with rescue teams in the search for more victims.
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With nearly a week passing since the disaster, fears have grown that the ultimate death toll could come close to the 90 people still listed as missing or unaccounted for - a figure authorities arrived at on Wednesday after winnowing a much larger list by about half.
An estimated 180 people lived in the path of the landslide.
Although authorities have so far publicly identified five dead, and have withheld the names of everyone else listed as dead or missing, about 40 were identified on a local blog site, including several members of one family.
Authorities already have said that some of those killed might never be found, and on Thursday braced the public for news - still yet to come - that the number of dead would "increase substantially" in the next 24 to 28 hours.
Local fire district chief Travis Hots said rain and wind sweeping the area on Friday was working against the round-the-clock search efforts, adding, "We've got a hard day ahead of us."
