CHESAPEAKE, W.Va. — Dive teams suspended a search Wednesday evening in the Chesapeake area for a woman believed to have fallen into the Kanawha River.
A wheelchair belonging to 46-year-old Rebecca Horton was found in the afternoon, but Horton was unable to be located.
“She is missing, so the assumption is that she went into the river. But nobody saw her go in,” said Kanawha County Deputy Emergency Manager C.W. Sigman.
Chesapeake Police said they are treating the incident as a suicide. Sigman said that at this point there’s almost no doubt the search is for a body.
“Definitely. In very cold water, the right circumstance we may have a half-hour, hour or so,” he said. “Usually a younger person would have a better chance than an adult in our experience. An adult this long, no, it’s not going to be survivable.”
They made some progress on Wednesday’s search, but didn’t have any luck, Sigman said.
“The Belle divers made some pretty good searches,” he said. “They made a pretty good pattern. We could tell they were doing a good job (but) did not locate her.”
Sigman said the search would continue Thursday morning, as the river was too cold to continue searching into the evening.
“Water’s very cold; probably in the low thirties. It wasn’t that long ago we still had some ice in it,” he said. “They called it off about 5 o’clock and they’ll start again about 11 tomorrow.”
Emergency crews were called to the scene just after 1 p.m. Wednesday along Nancy Street in Chesapeake.
Crews were treating the incident as if Horton was in the river, but haven’t ruled out the possibility she could be somewhere else.