Grim Drama Unfolds for Search Crews

Haunted by the panicked face of young Adam Bischoff as he was swept away in roiling brown waters the day before, dozens of onlookers made a pilgrimage to the Los Angeles River on Thursday, some unable to believe that the young man is dead.

But there, on a sandy berm exposed as the storm receded, were the coroner’s investigators. Fifteen-year-old Adam Paul Bischoff, after passing dozens of potential rescuers who threw him ropes, garden hoses and inflatable rafts, was found only 100 feet downstream from a railroad trestle where he was last spotted Wednesday morning.

Adam’s father, David, stood at the riverbank, looking at the spot where the teen-ager’s body had been recovered.

“I just want to thank rescue workers who tried to save my son,” Bischoff said. “Thank you very much.”

As the latest storm stalked off in a fury of lightning and thunder, dozens of volunteer and professional searchers headed out into muddy riverbanks, up frigid mountain peaks and out over an ocean stained brown by a week of weather the likes of which few Southern Californians could remember.

The drying skies gave way to the grim searches for bodies and, hopefully, survivors--searches that inevitably follow the cyclical disasters of nature. For searchers caught up in the heart-wrenching dramas and disappointments Thursday, it was part and parcel of a job whose frustrations and rewards are large.

“When you’re out there, all you do is concentrate on your job, try to put a body in a body bag,” said Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Arve Wells. “But when you have time to reflect, you wonder. Who was he? Where was he when it happened? And, I guess, could it have been me?”

High on Mt. Baldy, frustrated searchers were hampered by looming avalanche danger, unable to launch a full-scale search for two experienced Orange County skiers missing since late Tuesday.

In Ventura, where a flood wiped out a riverbed settlement known as “Hobo Jungle” and washed away trailers in a recreational vehicle park, sheriff’s helicopter crews came back empty-handed, happy for the moment to find only a blue plaid shirt that may, or may not, have belonged to another of the storm’s victims. Because the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department had no confirmed reports of missing people, further intensive searches were called off.

But the most compelling story was of Adam, an affable athlete and excellent student from El Camino Real High School.

It was a death everyone could see coming and no one could seem to prevent.

Television cameras captured his fear as the 10th-grader struggled to stay above the turbulent muddy waters of the Los Angeles River as it coursed through Reseda on Wednesday. On Thursday, the river had slowed, but trees bent to the ground testified to the force of the current the day before.

LAPD Lt. Don Kitchen said he avoided assigning the officers who had tried to save Adam’s life to search for the body. “I felt they had been through enough as it was,” he said.

But Joel Price, a veteran LAPD homicide detective, came back. He said he had tried to help the boy by tying a garden hose around an officer who waded into the river and extended a pole from a passing pool-man’s truck. But, in trying and failing to reach the pole, Adam let go of a log he was using for a flotation device.

“I don’t think there’s ever been anything that’s bothered me as much as this,” said Price, as he stood near the banks of the river where Adam’s body was found. “I saw it happen. I feel as though there should have been something else I could have done.”

In Ventura on Thursday, raging waters had subsided to about 10 feet from the 50-foot-deep torrent that topped bridges across the Ventura Freeway on Wednesday and claimed the life of a homeless man who lived in the normally dry bed of the Ventura River.

Wells, 46, who was coordinating the search, had stood up to some ribbing when they had first been trained in “swift water rescue” three years ago. What swift water?

On Wednesday, however, he was out in the middle of a raging brown river that reminded him of spring flooding back in Elgin, Ill. It fell to him and a colleague to haul out of the river the body of a young man in shorts and tennis shoes.

“People think they can’t drown in Southern California,” Wells said. “But the power and force of the river is what gets them.”

Ventura pilot Dave Heald and diver Bob Naef, a team who helped pluck people from camper rooftops and islands in the muddy river Wednesday, were back in the air Thursday morning, searching for bodies possibly swept out to sea. As they headed out over the coast in their helicopter, they were amazed to see a surfer sitting in the brown murk.

The two, who were part of a Ventura County Sheriff’s Department search and rescue team of 10 deputies and 29 volunteers, bantered with one another about Wednesday’s work that netted 30 to 35 people saved, six dogs and a pair of Siamese cats.

As the helicopter hovered low, the intercom line within the cabin fell silent and all eyes were intent on searching the bushes and piles of debris for signs of life, or death.

“It’s difficult to tell because a body can be in a shape that just doesn’t look like a person,” Heald said. “They can be all folded up, or partly buried, maybe only an elbow is sticking out.”

After they spotted a garment that was believed worn by a second homeless man, they hovered very near, combing the area with their eyes.

“That’s a blue plaid shirt, all right, but there’s no body,” Heald said.

The deputies recognized two men walking in the riverbed that they had pulled out of the water the day before, amazed that they would return when another storm is expected to arrive in the next few days.

“But there probably isn’t a lot of available housing for them in Westlake,” Naef said, referring to the upscale community on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Some advocates for the homeless, including Evelyn Burge, Ventura County public health nurse, criticized authorities for not adequately warning residents of Hobo Jungle that the floodwaters were coming. She said she feared that residents were going to return to the riverbed without warning of another storm expected this weekend.

In Mt. Baldy, the search for two missing Orange County skiers entered its second day as search patrols were hampered by blizzard conditions and severe avalanche danger.

Tim Tinsley, ski patrol supervisor at the mountain’s ski resort, said crews hit the mountain at the crack of dawn to probe an area called “South Bowl.”

But after testing snow conditions, they realized that the avalanche danger was too high. Their frustration was exacerbated by the fact that they did not know whether the two missing skiers--Tim Pines and Charlie Prior--were even in the bowl.

“We just don’t know where to start looking,” Tinsley said. “You can’t just walk around aimlessly not knowing where to go.”

By 5 p.m., when most of the search-and-rescue teams came down off the mountain, Ellen Prior, the missing skier’s wife, stood in the parking lot of the search command center, saying she was optimistic.

“I’m gonna stay,” she said, “until they make me go.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Laurie Becklund and Aaron Curtiss from Los Angeles and Ashley Dunn from Mt. Baldy.