ROGUE VALLEY, Ore.- On Sunday, a boat capsized outside Umpqua River Bar. Of the five people on board, three survived. The tragic incident taking two lives and leaving a Rogue Valley woman with unimaginable loss.
Just before 9:30 A.M. Sunday, the Coast Guard Umpqua River Station got a report of a capsized vessel. Two boats and a helicopter were sent to the scene where first responders discovered three of the five people on board in the water.
“It only took the crew about six minutes to arrive on scene once the call was made,” said U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class Diolanda Caballero.
The other two, a woman and a five year old girl were trapped in the cabin of the boat.
“They deployed the surface swimmer from one of the small boats and the rescue swimmer from the helicopter,” Caballero said. The rescue swimmer got the two people out of the cabin.
“They noticed they were unresponsive and immediately conducted CPR the entire way back to the docks.”
Once they reached EMS, the older woman was pronounced dead. The little girl was rushed to a nearby hospital, and also pronounced dead.
Those two lost lives were the mother and daughter of Rogue Valley woman, Kristin Zippi.
“Her daughter was just like, the light of her life. And her motivation for everything. She’s also so close to her family, both her parents and her mom,” explained family friend Becca Laroi. She says Kristin and her family were on her parent’s boat, which they’d gone out on regularly over the years.
Laroi set up a GoFundMe* as soon as she heard the news, feeling it was the least she could do to help her friend dealing with unimaginable loss.
She remembers Sophie, the five year old girl, similar to her mother- a ball of positive energy.
“The laughter that she brought just lit everyone else up around her,” Laroi said. She says over the past year and a half, Zippi lost her sister and later her home in the Almeda fire.
“To have that many things happened is just the kind of grief that no body should have to go through,” Laroi said. She says through that time, Kristin’s mother was her rock.
“So supportive, such a strong supportive person through so many things that have happened in her life, just an anchor for Zippi.” She wants to stress how amazing of a mother Kristin was and how much she loved the two of them.
In the past day, the GoFundMe* has raised well over half of it’s $20,000 goal.
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