Firefighters now confirm that the missing person they are looking for along Bull Creek is 51-year-old Jennifer Ring of Westlake.
Firefighters still say that are not certain that Ring was the driver of the Lexus SUV that witnesses saw get swept away in Bull Creek flood waters Wednesday morning. However, the SUV does belong to Ring. A barge pulled Ring's crumpled SUV out of Bull Creek late Thursday.
Friends confirm that a photograph posted on Ring’s Facebook page is of her. They say she is the mother of two children, and an artist. Other friends, who did not want to be interviewed on camera spent much of Friday morning, searching on foot for the woman they know as “Jenny” in the wooded areas along Bull Creek.
One of the women told KVUE News, “We couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.”
However, Captain Andy Reardon with the Austin Fire Department says with each day that goes by, statistics of finding Ring alive grow more grim.
“We always maintain hope that we will find her, but as i said before, basically, as the time from the original incident happened, the probability of finding a missing person alive goes down,” Reardon said.
Austin firefighters scaled back their search Friday to just one boat patrol twice a day along Bull Creek and Lake Austin. The receding water means that they now cannot cover as much of an area by boat. This means that they must search a wider area of land on foot.
“As the water tends to recede there are exposed areas where there's rocks and debris and things like that, so it exposes other places that we may need to go and look, and those are things that the boat crews are doing now, is noting areas as the water recedes, that we need to go and take a second or third look at,” Reardon added.
Firefighters say they will continue the boat patrol on Bull Creek until Ring is found. There are also patrols on Lake Austin, which Bull Creek feeds. Search teams told KVUE News Thursday that it is possible Ring could have ended up in as far away as Lady Bird Lake.
