GREAT BARRINGTON — Snow from an approaching Nor’easter was falling on jagged ice shelves that had formed in the bitter, late January cold along the Housatonic River behind Main Street businesses.
At 8:30 in the morning on January 25, 2000, 5-year-old Shirley Ann Palmer and her 9-year-old brother Ricky left their Cottage Street home for the short walk south to the Bryant School.
Dark, glittering water swirled around ice floes as the pair stepped away from the Cottage Street Bridge. Instead of the familiar route along Main Street, they chose the river.
After stepping onto the ice, Ricky slipped into the water. His sister, wearing a red plaid jacket and carrying a pink backpack, fell in as she reached for him and was pulled beneath the ice. Ricky grabbed onto a rock and turned to find his sister gone. A neighbor spotted him.
Local firefighters and police got Ricky ashore, but couldn’t find Shirley. Former Great Barrington Police Chief William Walsh jumped into water he recalls as numbingly cold, but found only the backpack. “Even in the snow, there were reflections in the water and something floated by and I grabbed it,” Walsh recalled.
The call went out for more help, and it came. It would become one of the Commonwealth’s most extensive search-and-rescue operations ever. Fire and medical personnel from 87 units began arriving from New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, converging in a staging area inside Searles Middle School to await assignment. They didn’t stop coming, even after the rescue transitioned to a recovery.
A white boot popped up near the bridge a day later. A purple hat, Shirley’s favorite color, was found farther downstream. It was the color of the lapel pins that would be worn by many in solidarity with the family for weeks after. Shirley’s photograph was tacked to a bulletin board at the center of the room above a handwritten message: “think positive.”
A steady stream of residents and businesses delivered vats of chili, baguettes, plates of sandwiches, soda, and granola bars. They answered local radio station WSBS’ bid for items as needed, as Laura Keefner kept track. They asked for coffee-cup lids and hot food, and rooms to house volunteers overnight. And they got them.
On the food tables, three chafing dishes grew to a dozen in the school auditorium. Guido’s Market was stamped on a box of energy bars. Jack’s Country Squire sent up a box of extra-warm socks. Subway sent sandwiches. Sheffield carpenter Eric Shutz heard the bid for someone to move pots of soup, supplies, and generators. He brought his box truck with a power lift. “It was a powerful feeling in that room,” he said at the time.
Then-Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci pledged to devote whatever state resources were needed and for however long. An adjacent ballfield was plowed, and quickly filled with rescuers’ vehicles and delivery trucks.
Morning briefings were convened by Massachusetts State Police Tactical Commander Daniel Jamroz as the weather and river dynamics changed. A computer-generated probability chart offered up the possibility of a “find” in sectors A-G along a 1.6-mile stretch of water from Cottage Street to a log jam below the fairgrounds left by the great Memorial Day tornado of 1995.
The focus, consistently, was on the 86-percent chance in sector A, a stretch between the Cottage and Bridge Street bridges a block east from Route 7. Despite the science of the search, Jamroz said the River Gods had not given her up.
The hope was that the river, known as “beyond the mountain place” to Native Americans, wouldn’t keep its secrets as it had 52 years earlier when the Brinson boy fell in the same current while playing with his sister and was never found.
The number of volunteers swelled to 600 by Saturday, Jan. 29. Dozens of smaller towns sent first responders: New Marlborough, Sandisfield, Sheffield, Egremont. A crew from Torrington, Connecticut, and firefighters from paid departments in Pittsfield, Boston, and Worcester — a department which had lost three of its own in a warehouse fire less than two months earlier — also arrived. The Worcester team, including divers, recognized many in Great Barrington who had helped them in the search for the bodies of their own firefighters in the charred remains of Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse.
They came from throughout the Northwest Corner of Connecticut, towns as far away as Terryville and New Milford, and small communities lining Route 22 in Dutchess County, New York. Tim and Andrea Downs, whose children included a son Shirley’s age, made the half-hour trip in shifts from Falls Village.
“It was the biggest event of its kind in terms of camaraderie and teamwork I have ever been involved in,” said Andrea, who spent five days along the river supporting the Massachusetts State Police Dive Team and would go on to become a career paramedic. “We all had different roles to play, but we were somehow all equal. We all cared most about finding this child. It was surreal. It could have been anyone’s child. I imagined my own children doing the same thing. And we had to stay to finish the job.”
Shirley’s parents, Nancy and Felix Paul, took the stage in the school auditorium Saturday afternoon. The room fell silent. Nancy buried her head in her husband’s shoulder as he offered thanks on behalf of the family. A prayer was said.
“I remember the people looking out from that room,” Nancy said. “It was a rough day.”
Applause rose from 100 or so teary-eyed men and women in various states of dress, in turnout gear and ice rescue suits, who were between 30-minute shifts on the river. The work went on systematically, even as temperatures dipped to wind-chill factors of minus-30 degrees.
Ice augers were used to drill holes large enough to snake underwater cameras on cables and poles into for a view beneath larger ice floes. Firefighters trained in ice rescue donned red and yellow suits and tethered themselves to other firefighters along the shore. A red umbrella, swirling quickly by in the current, was snatched from the water.
Kick-boards were used to scan the fringes with snorkels. One volunteer suffered frostbite when his hands froze. Another broke his foot on the embankment.
Clergy said prayers as the days stretched on and hopes of finding Shirley waned.
Four days into the search, Cornwall, Connecticut, firefighter Skip Kosciusko called Robert Stair of Great Falls Dredging in Falls Village to ask about the availability of his small, custom dredging machine. Mounted on a barge but maneuverable, it could break through the larger slabs and allow for a more thorough search.
“We had to climb over a locked fence to get it out of Camp Isabella Freedman in Falls Village, where it was stored, and weren’t even sure it would start,” Adam Rand of Sheffield said of his decision to help out, foregoing a planned snowmobiling trip north with Stair.
“Before he would allow it, the commander wanted assurance we would be able to control the barge. Everything was very regimented. We told him we could, even though it had never been used in moving water before,” said Kosciusko, a tree worker who helped fashion a system with braid rope to stabilize the barge from the riverbank.
On the sixth day, snow reflected the orange of another cold sunset. State police, in command of the scene, were ready to order an end to the massive effort that afternoon. A trooper assigned to inform the dredging crew returned to the command center after seeing the determined effort and suggested they be allowed to continue until dark.
A metal carabiner known as a “safety eight” controlling the hydraulic ram had worn nearly through from rope friction when a pin at the end of a piston broke. “We’re done,” Stair said. “That’s a two-week repair even if you can find the part.”
The problem was explained at the command center at Camp Eisner on Brush Hill Road, near classrooms where Shirley and her brother would have been, now shuttered for the week. A welder was quickly located to make the repair.
Stair, piston in hand, was escorted into the back of a police cruiser that sped through town to the welder’s shop. The part was fixed and the dredger went back to work.
As dusk fell, Rand spotted Shirley’s red jacket and raised his arms. Others moved in to find her tucked beneath an 18-inch chunk of ice five feet from the eastern shoreline, perfectly intact, not far from the “A” sector.
“Team Zulu,” the code for her discovery was broadcast over responders radios. Arms pointed in silence toward the eastern shore. Walsh rushed to the silence of the place where Shirley was found. “She was finally home,” he said. “But it was a gut punch to a whole community.”
The weight of sadness fell hard. Determined, task-minded volunteers stopped to pray and to cry all along the riverbank, Andrea recalled. Silence fell at the command center where the message was asked to be repeated.
In Litchfield County, where dozens of volunteers had spent time along the river, a dispatcher said simply that the search had ended with a positive outcome.
“Everyone wanted to see Shirley Ann brought home so she could be put to rest and bring a sense of closure for all of us, her family, and those who became a part of a bigger family, not by blood but from a large group of people whose hearts ached along with us for the loss of my little girl Shirley Ann,” her mother Nancy said, still tearful over the events. “I think of her all the time.”
The Hickey-Birches Funeral Home (now Birches-Roy) donated its services.
“They were of one mind and one heart, to bring Shirley Palmer home,” the Rev. Charles “Pastor Van” VanAusdall said at Shirley’s funeral the following Thursday at St. Peter’s Church.
In the days and weeks that followed and the river began to melt, still numbed by loss, Nancy would hide herself at times in a closet apart from her three other young children, to cry. Finally, she could no longer suffer living so close to the river that had taken her child.
Raised in the nearby small town of Mill River, Nancy and Felix, of Sheffield, and their three sons moved that summer to Chatham, New York. Nancy works at a bank, but always stays home on January 25, and Shirley’s birthday (August 11), to watch an old VHS recording of her.
A grandmother now, she sees her daughter’s eyes in her 2-year-old grandson. Shirley’s brother Ricky works at a hospital and lives in Pittsfield with his fiancée.
The river isn’t as cold as it used to be. Its waters run more freely in midwinter than they did 22 years ago. If the world also seems different and more divided, Police Chief Paul Storti — then a rookie officer — is as quick as Walsh to assure that the same capacity for an unusual outpouring of community support remains today.
“The spirit is still there in a town that was affected so profoundly,” said Walsh, who grew up in the town he went on to serve.
“It was just a massive engine without egos that kept moving forward,” former Cornwall firefighter Phil West said.
West, Kosciusko, Rand, Stair, and former Cornwall chief Connie Hedden were given free passes to Mohawk Ski Area in their hometown the following week as thanks for their effort. The tickets were stamped “barge crew.”
“I kept that for the longest time,” West said.
The river that flows largely unnoticed through town and on into Connecticut’s Northwest Corner is still a reminder to many of a smiling 5-year-old with bangs and baby teeth, a girl they didn’t know who loved to draw, ride her bicycle, hug strangers, and break into spontaneous dance when Janet Jackson came on the radio. She had, her mother said, learned the words to sing along with Sarah McLachlan’s “I will remember you.”
Like so many who were there, Walsh turns his head to glance at the icy water when he crosses the Main Street bridge just north of Cottage Street.
Shirley’s ashes are kept in a small heart pendant that swings from the rearview mirror in Nancy’s car.
“I pretend she is dancing,” Nancy said.
Sandisfield resident Brigitte Ruthman is a farmer and a journalist who spent four days as an EMT and firefighter helping in the search for Shirley Ann in January 2000.
