DUBLIN, Ky. — A horse-drawn buggy carrying an Amish family of nine who went to make a phone call toppled in a rain-swollen creek in rural Kentucky, killing four children who were swept away in the water, authorities said Friday.
The group was traveling in a downpour in the dark Thursday about 8:30 p.m. CST when the buggy flipped during a severe storm. The buggy was crossing a creek that is normally a trickle, but often floods during heavy rains.
Those killed were a 5-month-old; a 5-year-old; a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old. Three of the children were siblings and one was a cousin.
Two adults and three other children escaped. The horse that was pulling the buggy also survived.
The uncle of the 11-year-old who died said the family had used what is known as a "phone shack" and was going home when the buggy overturned.
"She was just an all-around good girl," Levi Yoder, 30, said of his niece.
The discovery of her body about 9:45 a.m. Friday dashed hopes that she might have been alive, clinging to a tree or rock through the night. The other three bodies were discovered shortly after midnight.
They buggy was traveling in the sparsely populated farming community of Dublin, heavily populated with Amish, in far western Kentucky near the Tennessee, Missouri and Illinois borders.
The apparently unnamed creek flows through farmland along a narrow, paved road.
"Whenever they crossed it, the water was so swift it just took the buggy and tipped it over," Graves County Sheriff Dewayne Redmon said.