Father Discovers Missing Son’s Body in River

The father of a missing 22-year-old Diamond Bar man made the discovery he had been dreading Wednesday morning when he and a friend found the body of his son lodged beneath a dead tree spanning the Santa Clara River.

Oscar Rodriguez had been swept away by the rain-swelled river Monday, when waters were more than 4 feet above normal.

Twenty Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies had combed 10 miles of riverbanks in Acton--a rustic community about 16 miles southwest of Palmdale--by air and on foot, searching for scraps of clothing or other clues before they called off the search Tuesday afternoon. They had planned to resume the search Wednesday, when water levels subsided.

Frustrated by the holdup, the family hired a private helicopter from Van Nuys Airport on Wednesday morning. But before it reached the river, the body was found.

Rodriguez’s father, also named Oscar, and Manuel Gonzalez of Valencia spotted Rodriguez’s white-soled shoe sticking up from under a downed tree only a quarter mile downstream from where he disappeared, sheriff’s deputies said.

The father and his friend tried to pull the corpse from the frigid water but failed. Deputies later recovered the body at the site, almost a mile south of the Shambala Preserve for wild animals.

“They just called me to help,” said Gonzalez, in Spanish, shivering in a wet sweat shirt. “And now . . . I can’t believe it.”

Deputies said that Rodriguez was no stranger to the area. On many weekends, the 1988 Glendale High School graduate drove a Jeep to a friend’s backwoods property that stretched along the Santa Clara River, off Soledad Canyon Road.

On Sunday, before rains swelled the river, Rodriguez and two friends took a bumpy ride in the riverbed, deputies said. When the Jeep broke down and Rodriguez was not able to restart it, he and his friends returned home.

Rodriguez returned to the river at 4 p.m. Monday with two other friends to recover the vehicle, deputies said. Although it was raining fiercely and the second car got stuck in the mud, Rodriguez insisted on going to pick up his own Jeep--which was stranded across the raging river.

He apparently tried to cross the water on foot and was swept away, deputies said. Four hours after he disappeared, deputies and volunteers began their search.

Sgt. David Webster, Antelope Valley Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team coordinator, said the waters were rushing so fast and pushing so violently that Rodriguez may have died as quickly as 60 seconds after entering the water.

Webster said he went into the river Tuesday roped to the banks and wearing a life vest. “But in a second I was horizontal,” he said.

Grieving family members watched, too stunned to talk, as deputies examined the riverbanks and underbrush.

“It hurts us too much,” Oscar’s mother, Isabel Rodriguez, said in Spanish. “It’s painful to us all.”