NEW ORLEANS — Octavia Wilson can’t stop thinking about the day she let four of her kids venture out to a park along the Mississippi River near their Algiers home.
“My big girl said, ‘Mom, I’m going to take the kids to the park,’ so I figured I never let them leave from the front door, so why not?” said Wilson “My kids never came back. They never came back.”
Wilson’s two daughters, Ally Berry Wilson, 8, and Brandy Wilson, 14, were swept away by the river’s current, along with a friend, Kevin Poole, 15.
“It’s like a dream that I’m not waking up from,” said Wilson.
That was April 23. The bodies of Brandy and Kevin surfaced a week and a half later. Ally is still missing.
“My hope was through the roof. I just knew that she was coming right behind them,” said Wilson.
From the U.S. Coast Guard to volunteer groups, Wilson has watched search crews come and go. Now, more than a month later, searches are called off. Wilson says she feels like her family has been forgotten about.
“It’s hurtful,” said Wilson. “It’s hurtful and I’m willing to go through and do any and everything that I can to find my baby.”
Faced with planning a funeral for Brandy, Wilson prays she’ll be able to bury both girls together.
“I just want to be able to have both of my girls and get some kind of closure,” said Wilson.
To find Ally, Wilson wants to use the more than $16,000 raised through the family’s GoFundMe account to pay for another search.
“We want a search and rescue team going back out again, like ASAP,” said family friend Michael Willis. “If everybody says the reason why the search stopped is because they were out of resources. Ok, we’re going to put up the money ourselves.”
Willis says the family is pleading with the city, or anyone, who can best direct them.
“They might have resources out here. We don’t know nothing about them,” said Willis.
With five sons at home, Wilson says their smiles and prayer keep her going, but at times, the pain is unbearable.
“I sit down, and I think, and I cry. Because I don’t want my boys to see me, that’s why I sleep across the street by the graveyard sometimes, so I can think, and pray, and I can cry alone,” said Wilson. “The first night I got a good rest, I went to sleep in the graveyard. I slept so good.”
There’s been more sleepless nights than good ones though, all of them giving way to a painful reality.
“Every day I wake up it seems like she’s just going to come around the corner and say ‘Mom, mom it was a prank, we pranked you mom,’ but it’s not. It’s not,” said Wilson.
Unable to hold her daughters, Wilson holds on to faith, hoping for closure.
Adding to the grief, the Wilson family says strangers have been taking advantage of the situation by setting up bogus social media fundraisers. They hope some type of collaboration with the city can lead to Ally Berry Wilson being found.