WHITE CO. (Carmi), Ill.—The man responsible for notifying authorities of what was initially believed to be a body (later discovered to be the very-much-alive but injured Amy Chitwood) at the Little Wabash River dam in Carmi Sunday spoke to Disclosure later that evening about the situation…and what impact it had on him
Bruce Merritt, 50, has lived in Carmi for a couple of years. Originally from Chicago, he told Disclosure that he’d “never encountered anything like this before,” even coming from the big city and settling in little Carmi, population 5,200.
Approximate area of the Little Wabash River dam just north of Carmi where all this occurred
Merritt said he was fishing on Sunday morning, August 31, as he frequently does. At about 10:20 or so, he hadn’t gotten any bites above the dam site, so he decided to get closer to the dam.
Walking the bank, he said he turned around and “saw something that didn’t look normal for being down there.”
Merritt said he just stood and stared at the object, for what seemed like a really long time.
“It seemed like 20 minutes,” he told Disclosure, “but it was more only like about five, that I stared at it, trying to figure it out. Then I saw an ear. And then as I looked I figured out it was a person, all balled up in a fetal position.”
Merritt said it was his immediate assessment that whoever the person was, it “looked like they’d been down there for a long time. They were completely covered in mud.” A little up the river, he said he could see a pewter-colored Dodge truck “kinda buried in the mud.”
Merritt said he was about 12 feet away from the “body,” and that the mud in the area was about two feet thick. Knowing that recent rains had caused the river to rise, and then in the last days of August, the river had gone down, Merritt said he believed right away that it might’ve been a body that had come to rest on the bank after the water had gone down. So he grabbed his gear and ran up the bank and to the first house he saw, and had the resident notify authorities while he went back to the riverbank. The situation was tense, as there have been a number of women reported missing in Illinois and Indiana in recent months, with several of them never having turned up.
Merritt said it took about 20 minutes for authorities to arrive. He stood by and talked to them intermittently while they worked with the “body.”
At the point in time when one of the white body bags was being zipped up, that’s when authorities saw the bag move…and they figured out that it wasn’t a “body” at all, but a still-alive woman.
A helicopter was summoned, and authorities took the woman up the bank and managed to get whom they later identified as Amy Chitwood out of the riverbank and to a hospital.
Merritt said he was never told anything about the Dodge truck; authorities kept asking him if the truck was his (it was not). He also said that they took his name and phone number and said he could “come back and get his gear,” but he’d already gotten it out of there.
Now, Merritt said, the incident, which has left him somewhat traumatized, has adversely impacted his fishing in a considerable way. He told Disclosure he’s disinclined to fish at all, and especially at that locale (near the dam), ordinarily a great spot.
“I usually catch catfish and filet em, and give them to an elderly lady who lives across the street from me,” he said. “Not now. Not for awhile. This was eerie. I can’t get it out of my head.”
Chitwood’s condition wasn’t immediately available, but authorities yesterday said that she was recovering, with an injury to her hip that apparently was sustained when she fell on the rocks in the dam area.