Binman spotted car the four teens were in nearly two days after they went missing
A passing binman spotted the Ford Fiesta containing the bodies of four tragic teens[1] nearly two days after they went missing, the Mirror has been told. Farmer Rhys Williams lives at Garreg Hyll Drem Farm, just 25 metres from the spot where the four bodies were found at 10am yesterday morning. He and his wife Carys had been woken hours earlier by the sound of a search and rescue helicopter.
He told the Mirror: “Early yesterday we heard the helicopter directly above us. It had the searchlight on. It was still dark.
It was hovering and loud. I didn’t think much of it. It moved on and came back later.
They wouldn’t have seen anything, no chance.”
Final moments of four missing boys as Wales camping trip went tragically wrong[2]
Jevon Hirst (pictured) (WALES NEWS SERVICE)
Wilf Fitchett (pictured) (WALES NEWS SERVICE)
Jevon Hirst, 16, Harvey Owen, 17, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Hugo Morris, 18, who were all studying A-Levels at the same college, had gone to the picturesque area of Snowdonia to camp. The trip turned to tragedy after their silver Ford Fiesta plunged off a windy country road and overturned in a flooded ditch. They were reported missing by their worried families in Shrewsbury, Shropshire when they failed to return home on Monday.
Mr Williams described “brutal” weather[3] conditions on Sunday when the youngsters lost contact with their families. It is not known when the fatal accident took place. Mr Williams said they were “so unlucky” to have left the road on a sharp bend, flipping their vehicle into a ditch that was flooded by two days of rain.
Harvey Owen (pictured) (WALES NEWS SERVICE)
Hugo Morris. (North Wales Police)
Carys later saw on Facebook[4] that North Wales Police[5] had issued an appeal for the missing teens.
She was fighting back tears as Mr Williams said: “They were found by the recycling lorry at 10 that morning. They were higher up, that’s why they could see them. The binman told us they had phoned the police.
It is only 25 metres around the corner from here. I could see the car but I didn’t see anything else. They must have been going from Harlech north towards Snowdonia.
This is one of two roads they could have taken. There are no tracks on the road, nothing to be seen. It’s a sharp bend, it narrows.
There were lots of leaves on that corner. There have been one or two accidents there before.” The Fiesta was removed from the scene on Tuesday evening.
But officers returned to search the area by torchlight on Wednesday morning. Mr Williams added: “They were so unlucky, the way the car went in. It has gone into the ditch, low into the ditch.
It’s a small car. I went past and didn’t see anything. Two buses would have gone past before 10am and not seen anything.
They would have been there all Monday. You have got to be in a high vehicle to see anything and you have got to be looking, a passenger. The driver would have been looking at the road.
The binman who saw it said that something caught his eye. He was on his phone and he looked over. You would struggle to see from a car.”
Floral tributes in Garreg left in the memory of the four teenagers from Shrewsbury (Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror)
The bend where the car left the road is a point at which the mobile signal, patchy on some networks, can disappear.
Mr Williams said: “Some networks have no signal here. EE is good, but Vodafone is not good. On Sunday the water was high.
It is brutal on Sunday. There’s always a foot or two of water in the ditch but it can come up to six feet, the level of the car. It was bad on Friday and Saturday, the river had gone high quickly.
But by Tuesday morning the level had come down. They were so unlucky. They could have hit a tree or a fence and gone in another way.”
The families are expected to identify their son’s bodies in Bangor today.
North Wales Police said in a statement yesterday that their deaths appear to have been a “tragic accident.” The road remained closed on Wednesday afternoon when a specialist police underwater and marine search van arrived.
References
- ^ of four tragic teens (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ Final moments of four missing boys as Wales camping trip went tragically wrong (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ weather (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ Facebook (www.mirror.co.uk)
- ^ North Wales Police (www.mirror.co.uk)