Bodies of 2 Boys Found in River; 2 Others Missing : Tragedy: A fifth youth was rescued earlier. The five were playing by the Calaveras River when they slipped in.

Rescuers on Thursday recovered the bodies of two of the four young boys who were swept away in the rain-swollen Calaveras River the day before, while hundreds of people stood watch on levees nearby and the boys’ mothers grieved.

All through the day, up to 50 searchers dragged the river bottom and walked along the banks, while translators and counselors went into the Stockton elementary schools to help classmates sort out what had happened.

“The water is very murky,” an officer said as the search continued with the help of dogs, divers and officers on foot and in helicopters. “When they go into the water, they are searching completely by feel.”

About three hours into the search, divers found the body of Vanna Soun, 9, beneath a bridge a few dozen yards downstream from where the boys fell in. His brother, Sitha, 10, had been pulled into the water initially, but survived when a man who was strolling nearby with his wife came to his rescue.

“We were all holding hands and then they let go of me,” Soun told the Stockton Record. “My brother drowned.”

The other boys, friends of the Souns, also were brothers: Charles Pich, 7, Danalee Pich, 8, and Herbert Pich, 9. Charles’ body was recovered about a mile down river.

At midday the mother of the three boys, Siheang Lim, trudged through the slippery mud to the spot on the steep riverbank where the boys fell in. She was accompanied by about a dozen friends, including an elder who later was described as a “wise man.”

Speaking loudly in Cambodian at the site where the boys slipped into the water, the man demanded that the river return the boys. Siheang Lim, 31, pregnant with another child, also sobbed and yelled toward the river.

In a ceremony to get the attention of the “spirit” in the river, the elder and his helpers brought burning incense. To appease it, they presented a roast duck on an ornate platter, along with soda, liquor and cigarettes, which they left smoldering when they left 15 minutes later.

“He tried to call the body to come up,” explained Sim Chantha, 25, who had helped the elder pray. “He talked to the spirit. The spirit talked to him and said the child is hiding.”

Chantha called the location at the river’s edge a “bad spot,” one in which another child died sometime back, although police could not confirm it. He said the Cambodians believed spirits in the river had lured the boys to their deaths.

For Chantha and others, the deaths brought back memories of the day in January, 1989, when a crazed gunman, Patrick Purdy, opened fire and killed five children and wounded 29 others on the Cleveland Elementary School playground. Through his job at Headstart, Chantha knows some of the families affected by the shooting.

“Tears come out for no reasons--very sad. It’s like it is boiling inside,” Chantha said.

The boys had ventured to the river in the late afternoon on Wednesday. Srey Veth, 22, saw them and, realizing the river was dangerous, said he told them to get back and return home.

Speaking through an interpreter, Veth said they left for a short time but returned. The next time he saw them, they were shouting for help. Veth ran to the riverbank and was able to pull Sitha Soun to safety. But the current was too strong for him to reach the others.

He called to people on a nearby bridge for help, but “they pretended they didn’t hear.” However, two women on the levee ran for a phone and called police.

A Stockton police squad car happened to be on the bridge just downriver, and the officer raced down. When he arrived, the four children were gone. He kept people from jumping in after the children, to the dismay of some. Some people said they could see the boys’ arms flailing above the water as they were pushed downstream.

“I saw them slip and then I started to run to them,” said San Pros, 15. By the time he arrived, he could see no one. “I tried, but I didn’t see any kids,” he said, wiping an eye.

Pros said he watched as the boys crossed a part of the river plain that had flooded and walked over to the main river channel. They were holding hands and one of the boys leaned over, as if to test the water, “and they just fell.”

Pros is friends with the oldest of the five, the one who survived, and had gone swimming with him at a community pool. “He’s a good boy,” Pros said. Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese children from nearby apartments often go to the Calaveras River to play. It usually is more of a stream. But it’s deep enough for fishing.

“They come every day in the summer--fishing, swimming, sitting on a log, having fun,” Pros said. But now, he said, “they’ll be scared. I don’t think they’ll come.”

Pros recalled that a friend of his died about two years ago in the same area. “Almost every year people die,” he said.

None of the children went to Cleveland Elementary School, the site of the massacre two years ago, although the two Soun brothers were from the same general neighborhood.

The children attended three schools. At one of the schools, Harrison Elementary, classmates on Thursday colored pictures of things one of the children liked and were planning to send them to the boy’s family. At King Elementary, there was an assembly and children were asked to talk about their feelings, said N. Z. Carol, spokeswoman for the Stockton schools.

Dr. Fred Busher, chair of the district’s psychological services, held out hope that the Southeast Asian refugee community would find it easier to deal with the drownings than with the schoolyard shooting.

“It is a natural disaster,” Busher said. “They’re not worrying that people are going to kill them.”

But he also noted, “Death is death.” While some of the students who were counseled on Thursday seemed undisturbed, “There is still a lot of shock.”

Youths Swept Away By Currents Four of five boys playing in the rain-swollen Calaveras River near Stockton’s downtown district were swept away by currents created when recent storms hit. The boys were believed to have entered the water at this point.