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Two teenage brothers have been missing for over a week in California after one of their kayaks flipped during a duck hunting trip.
Wesley and Andruw Cornett, 17 and 19 respectively, were last heard from on December 14 during their trip to Thermalito Afterbay in Butte County. On Monday, authorities announced that they were scaling back searches.
According to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, 911 dispatch received a call from Andruw around 8:30 a.m. on the day of the incident, saying that his brother’s kayak had overturned.
He told officers he was going to jump in to save his brother after being advised “multiple times” not to get in the water. Neither boy was wearing a life jacket.
Thermalito Afterbay is a 4,300-acre lake with weeds up to 10 feet tall and temperatures that threaten hypothermia, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
First responders arrived within 15 minutes of the initial call and located the kayak but not the teenagers. About 20 minutes later, a kayak, paddles and waders were found, but the boys were nowhere to be seen.
In a statement on Monday — the 10th day of the search — BCSO said it was shifting the focus to a “continuous limited search.” Over the course of the search divers located Andruw’s pants, Wesley’s wallet and jacket with his phone inside.
“At this point in the recovery, we have exhausted efforts with divers and sonar technology and will shift the focus to a continuous limited search,” the statement said. “This involves surface search methods, which includes aircrafts, drones, boats, on-shore vehicles, and K9s.”
Around 280 team members from 21 different agencies had previously been involved in the search.
“Thousands of acres have been searched by boat, by ground and by raft,” said Trevor Skaggs, with the Sheriff Office’s search and rescue team, in a video shared by the Sheriff’s Office.
In a post on GoFundMe, April Clark, the boys’ mother, said Andrew was a “hero in my eyes” for trying to save his brother.
“The Sheriff is saying this is now a search and recovery so I will have to also plan to lay my two boys to rest,” she wrote. “This is a freak accident that my family and I are trying to wrap our heads around and we also have 4 girls at home who we still need to care for.”
“This is hard for me to write as I’m beyond broken into so many pieces.”
