CNN
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Two hundred and sixteen. That’s how many days passed before crews in East Tennessee found the body of a man who was swept away in raging floodwaters caused by Hurricane Helene, bringing his family much-needed closure after months of searching.
Steven Cloyd and his dog went missing on September 27 while trying to escape fast-rising water coming from the Nolichucky River near his home, some 500 miles north of where Helene, a one-time Category 4 monster, made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region. Cloyd’s goldendoodle, Orion, was found alive 3 miles down the road, but Cloyd remained missing, a painful wound the family described as “numb confusion.”
A crew tasked with debris removal found human remains on May 1 along the Nolichucky River about 4 miles from where Cloyd was last seen. Two days later, Washington County Sheriff Keith Sexton announced they received confirmation from the medical examiner that the remains were Cloyd.
“With heavy hearts, we the family of Steve Cloyd announce that our husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, and friend was found,” his widow Keli said in a Facebook post. “We have the patriarch of our family again…He is in the light, he is at peace and he is free and he is perfect,” she added.
At least 250 people died from Hurricane Helene across six states, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the US mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a March report. In Tennessee, 19 people died, the state emergency management agency spokeswoman said in an update to CNN Tuesday.
With Cloyd’s remains having been found, that leaves one person still missing in Washington County, the county sheriff’s office said.
Two weeks after Cloyd went missing, his son Matthew said he lost hope in finding his dad alive. But he never fully lost hope that he would be found. “I’d say, the hope of finding him, I think, I always still held on to a little bit of hope that we would find him. I don’t think I completely lost that,” he said.
“You just don’t want him to be out there. And you see the debris and the stuff, and you don’t want him to be out there,” an emotional Matthew said.
Matthew went on to say that whenever the family was close to losing hope, someone with the Washington Sheriff’s Office or emergency management would talk with them and help restore it.
In the interview with CNN, Matthew shared the past few months of searching for his father have felt like a “roller-coaster ride.”
“There’s a lot of emotions that run through your mind,” he said. “You wonder, are people looking? Do people care? Is he going to be one of the ones that’s forgotten about?”
He and his family tried to stay calm and let the search process take its course, but then “panic starts to set in.” “Especially once you get into one month, two months, three months, four months and five months …you start thinking, is he really not going to be found?”
Matthew said he would fluctuate between feeling like he was not doing enough, to feeling like he was doing too much and burdening search teams. “You feel like you’re causing unwanted stress,” he said.
Matthew, based in Illinois, said he would split his time between searching for his dad in East Tennessee and being back home with his two kids and girlfriend. He would spend weeks searching through mud and debris, sometimes with search personnel, other times just with his younger brother.
Piles of debris and mud left after the flooding were overwhelming and made search efforts feel almost impossible, he said. Matthew said one day, when he was out searching with his brother, they were standing on debris the size of a football field. “It kind of felt like the ground was beneath you, but it wasn’t – you were six, seven feet in the air,” he said.
Steven Cloyd’s remains were pulled from under six feet of debris, according to Matthew. Two men tasked with debris removal told his mother that a flash of light caught their eye. It turned out to be Cloyd’s wedding band. That’s when they called in the authorities, he said.
Matthew said he cannot thank those two men enough. “They could’ve said screw it, we’re just gonna scoop this whole pile and throw it in the back of a truck,” he said.
