Bodies of mother, children found in Logan mudslide

LOGAN — The bodies of a mother and her two children buried in a massive mudslide were found Tuesday.

About 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Logan Mayor Randy Watts announced that the bodies of Jacqueline Leavey, the mother, and her daughter, Abbey Alanis, had been recovered. About 7 p.m., workers recovered the body of Victor Alanis, Leavey's son, police said.

"My mixed emotions are the result of gratitude that our workers were able to bring partial closure for the family, but that gratitude is certainly tempered by the pain we all feel for this family's loss," said Watts, who lived for 25 years in the Island area, just a few homes away from the slide area.

No other details about the recovery were made available Tuesday. Watts did not take any questions from the media.

Leavey's family also declined to make any statements Tuesday, Watts said.

Search crews were concentrating earlier in the day on the western portion of the house at 915 E. Canyon Road, just south of Utah State University.

The house, which did not have a basement, was buried in 15 feet to 25 feet of mud. Leavey, her 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son were believed to be inside the house at the time. Crews had been working since Saturday to recover the bodies in the slide near the Logan and Northern Canal.

Also Tuesday, 911 calls from Saturday's disaster were released to the media through Government Records Access and Management Act requests.

"I think someone is injured because the house went down the hill," one caller told emergency dispatchers. "Yeah, someone's in there."

The first 911 call was believed to be made by Leavey's landlord, Erik Ashcroft.

"The whole hill is starting to slough off, and there's water running out of the hillside here," said the 911 caller believed to be Ashcroft.

Another caller can be heard growing more urgent as the water flow begins to increase.

"It's starting to flood. … The water is coming down," the caller told 911 dispatchers.

Even as the first emergency responders arrived on scene and began looking for possible survivors, they knew right away the mountain still made the situation dangerous.

"The only thing we want to hear is 'evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,' then sound the horn," a firefighter told another emergency response commander on the two-way radio when talking about setting up lookout points. "We have continual slough going on above it. … I just saw probably half a dump truck load slide down."

The evacuation call was made at least three times over the two-way radio. Prior to one evacuation order, a firefighter exclaimed, "The tree is coming down."

"A big chunk is coming down, big chunk, big chunk, big chunk" could be heard on another occasion before the order to "evacuate, evacuate, evacuate."