We begin with a tragic story out of Johnson County: a 4-year-old child swept away from his parents in flash flood waters. NBC 5’s Keenan Willard spoke with his mother, who says she’s still trying to process this unthinkable loss.
A little boy was found dead hours after being swept away by floodwaters in North Texas early Sunday morning.
According to the Johnson County Sheriff's Office, a witness who called 911 at 2 a.m. notified deputies of a vehicle stuck in floodwaters with three occupants on County Road 528 in Burleson.
Authorities said the witness further reported the three occupants–a man, a woman, and a child–tried to walk to dry ground and got swept into the flood waters.
First responders and other emergency personnel immediately went to the scene and began searching for the victims.
The Johnson County Office of Emergency Management confirmed with NBC 5 that the man and the woman were rescued and taken to a local hospital at about 5 a.m.
After hours of searching the high waters, the child, identified as 4-year-old Lucas Warren, was found dead around 7:20 a.m.
The boy’s mother, Chelsey Warren, struggles to understand how life will go without Lucas. The four-year-old boy was her only child, a miracle baby who spent weeks in the NICU after he was born.
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“He’s the best,” Chelsey Warren said. “He’s such a bright, sweet, amazing, amazing boy.”
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On Saturday night, Chelsey, her husband, and Lucas visited a family at a house in Johnson County. They set back out for home early Sunday morning along a stretch of County Road 528.
It had been raining hard, and the family told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth the area was prone to flooding.
“Usually, there’s a block in the road that says don’t pass through there or has a sign that says flooding water, please turn around, and there was nothing,” Chelsey Warren said. “I had saw somebody else had gone through.”
The family tried to drive through water on the road, but it was surging too powerfully, and their car became trapped by the floodwaters.
“My car battery died, and then the car started filling up with water, so we grabbed Lucas out of his car seat,” Chelsey Warren said.
The family tried to escape the flooding on foot but were swept off the road.
Chelsey’s husband was separated from them, and for more than an hour, she trod water while holding onto Lucas, trying to keep her son’s head above the current.
“And a current came up real high, and he just let go,” Chelsey Warren said. “And I didn’t hear anything from him. I think he just went under.”
Warren told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth that Johnson County rescuers arrived in a boat minutes later, taking Chelsey to the hospital. They searched for Lucas Warren for the next two hours.
“Then the sheriff showed up here and told me they found him,” Warren said. “And that he looked really peaceful and that all of his clothes weren’t ripped. He looks like he just went to sleep.”
Lucas Warren drowned in the floodwaters three weeks before he was set to turn five years old. His mother told NBC 5 her family was still in shock and she would never be the same.
“He’s my everything,” Warren said. “I can’t sleep without him, I can’t, I do everything with him.”
The incident took nearly everything: Chelsey and her husband also lost their car, phones, and wallets in the floodwaters.
Hours after being launched, a GoFundMe for the family had raised more than $17,000.
The family told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth they would have to lean on their support system to make it through the months of grieving to come.
“Nothing’s ever going to bring Lucas back. Nothing’s ever going to fill that hole,” Warren said. “But if I can have some time to process and not worry about how we’re going to keep our house, I know we’ll be okay at some point.”
“It’s just going to take a long time,” she continued.
NBC 5 also reached out to the Johnson County Office of Emergency Management for a response to the family’s concerns that high water gates weren’t used to block off County Road 528 before this incident happened.
“Commissioner precincts generally close gates that might be on their roadways; that said, there had been no high water reported on that roadway until the call for rescue came in,” a spokesperson for the county’s office of emergency management said. “It is referred to as a flash flood because it happens very quickly.”
Loved ones have created a GoFundMe campaign to help with Lucas' funeral expenses and the family's loss of property during the fatal incident.
