A 3-year-old Texas girl was found shivering and clinging to her dead mother Tuesday after the pair got stuck in the floodwaters brought on by Hurricane Harvey.
The Beaumont Police Department on Wednesday identified the drowned woman as Colette Sulcer, 41, of Beaumont. The name of the child, who remained hospitalized Wednesday in stable condition, was not released.
Beaumont police officials said the toddler was doing well and had been reunited with family.
"She is absolutely precious. Everyone in the hospital fell in love with her," Officer Carol Riley, a spokeswoman for the department, told People magazine. "But it's heart-wrenching to think of her growing up without her mother."
Riley said that Sulcer’s family is devastated by her death, but “counting their blessings when they can.”
Police officials said officers were called shortly after 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to a service road off Interstate 10, where Sulcer had been driving when she hit high water. She pulled her vehicle into a parking lot, where it became disabled.
When she carried her daughter out of the vehicle in a search for higher ground, both were swept into the swift-moving waters. Police officers and divers in a Zodiac boat spotted Sulcer floating in a canal about half a mile from the vehicle, her toddler clinging to her body.
"The first responders got to the mother and child just before they went under a trestle," police officials said in the department's news release. "Water was up to the trestle and first responders would not have been able to save the child if they had floated under it."
The officers and divers began CPR on Sulcer. Her daughter was awake but suffering from hypothermia when she was rescued.
"First responders took turns performing CPR until they could get her to an ambulance," officials said. "Water was still high so a citizen helped by allowing first responders to load the mother and daughter in his truck and brought them all to a waiting ambulance at Laurel and 23rd Street."
Riley credited Sulcer with saving her daughter’s life.
"The mother did the best she could to keep her child up over the water," Riley told People. "The baby also had a backpack that was helping her float on her back, and she was holding on to her mom."
Beaumont and Port Arthur were hit hard by Harvey, which dumped more than 50 inches of rain on parts of Texas and left the city of Houston underwater. The storm made landfall for the final time around 4 a.m. Wednesday near Cameron, Louisiana.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the death toll from the storm had risen to 30 confirmed and suspected flood-related deaths.
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