Two survivors gave differing accounts of the seconds before their SUV plunged into North Alabama’s Weiss Lake and killed at least four of the seven passengers.
Kim Learned told Birmingham’s CBS 42 that driver Robert Hardin’s passengers were “telling him to turn around; that we were going toward the lake.” The passengers kept yelling, Learned said, but “he pushed the gas and we went on in.”
However, Cherokee County officials on Thursday didn’t put much stock in the new details.
Authorities said seven people were in the 2009 Saturn Outlook when it reached the end of Riverside Street and went off a boat ramp into 18 feet of water in Weiss Lake, about 60 miles southwest of Chattanooga.
By daybreak Wednesday, four people were confirmed dead and another was missing. Learned and another woman were treated at a Gadsden hospital and released. A search continued Thursday for the final victim.