Friends distraught: 'It makes me sick knowing a beautiful family is still in the water'. Source: 9 News
A devastated Gold Coast community is rallying around a widowed father and his lone surviving child, after the mother and two children died in a river tragedy.
New Zealander Stephanie King, 43, died trying to save her children, 7-year-old son Jacob and 11-year-old daughter Ella-Jane.
Their car careered off theroad into the flooded Tweed River on Monday, with the three bodies pulled from the submerged car yesterday afternoon.
Tweed Byron LAC Chief Inspector Mick Dempsey told News Corp that King was found "holding a child" and that he had no doubt "she was a hero".
"She would still be alive if she wasn't trying to save her children," he said.
Police divers arrive to recover a submerged car from the Tweed River. Photo / News Ltd
One wrote earlier: "It makes me sick knowing a beautiful family is still in the water, such a precious loss to all that knew you, I know I will miss you terribly".
One neighbour, Steven Moller, told News Corp he saw King just the other day.
"They were a perfectly normal family, I would see her loading her kids into the car," he said.
Former police officer Matthew Grinham was driving by floodwaters at Tumbulgum on Monday afternoon when he saw a girl hysterically screaming while running along the road, yelling that her mum, little sister and brother were trapped in the river in the car.
"We pulled up just after the car went under," Grinham recalled, speaking to the Daily Telegraph.
"She couldn't say much, she just said, 'My mum, my little sister and my [older] brother have gone in the river in a car'."
Grinham said he initially thought a calf had fallen in the water, but realised the situation was dire and leapt into action.
"I looked down on the road and saw the skid marks of a car, its tracks were in the mud and I just jumped in," he told the Australian.
The Tumbulgum local described the freezing and "horrible" murky flood waters, and the sense of despair when he realised he wouldn't be able to retrieve the car and the family members it was carrying.
"The helplessness of not being able to find the car, the bubbles were there, we could find the bubbles, we just couldn't get to the car," he said.
"At first we were going to go feet first, just pushing down to try and see if we could feel it with our feet. I tried a couple of times, but the bubbles, they trailed away.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had offered consular assistance to the father and daughter.
The tragedy is the latest in what has been a devastating few days for flood-hit northern NSW residents, with two women aged 36 and 64 confirmed dead and a man dying of a heart attack.
