In a heartbreaking turn of events, the lives of four young friends were tragically cut short during a camping trip to Eryri. Jevon Hirst, 16, Harvey Owen, 17, Wilf Fitchett, 17, and Hugo Morris, 18, all A-Level students at a Shrewsbury college, set out for a weekend adventure that would ultimately end in a devastating accident.
The alarm was raised when the quartet failed to return home on Monday, prompting concerned families to report them missing. The subsequent search for the missing teens took a somber turn when a passing binman, on his routine collection route, made a grim discovery. The Ford Fiesta, in which the friends had been travelling, lay overturned in a flooded ditch, its location camouflaged by the challenging weather conditions.
Farmer Rhys Williams, residing just 25 meters from the accident site at Garreg Hyll Drem Farm, described the weather on Sunday as “brutal.” He revealed to The Mirror that the unfortunate youngsters had veered off the road on a sharp bend, causing their vehicle to flip into the flooded ditch. Williams expressed his sympathy, noting, “They were so unlucky.”
It was only due to the elevated position of the recycling lorry that the binman, alerted by something catching his eye, spotted the submerged car. The discovery was made at 10 on Tuesday morning, with the binman promptly notifying the North Wales Police, who subsequently recovered the bodies.
Mrs. Carys Williams, Rhys’s wife, learned about the missing teens through a Facebook appeal by the police. Fighting back tears, she recounted the heartbreaking moment, stating, “They were found by the recycling lorry at 10 on Tuesday morning. They were higher up – that’s why they could see them.”
The challenging conditions of the road, compounded by two days of relentless rain, contributed to the severity of the accident. Mr. Williams elaborated on the challenging location, saying, “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 small size of the Ford Fiesta and the specific angle at which it entered the ditch made it virtually invisible to passing motorists. Mr. Williams remarked on the difficulties of spotting the accident, noting that only high vehicles with vigilant passengers would have had a chance to observe the tragic scene.
Highlighting the tricky conditions of the road, Mr. Williams pointed out that the area often experiences a loss of mobile signal, with some networks being more patchy than others. Despite the challenging circumstances, North Wales Police issued a statement characterizing the incident as a “tragic accident,” and the road remained closed as specialist police underwater teams and marine search vans continued their investigations.
