LAPUSH — When Joy Fuller arrived in LaPush a day after her father’s fishing boat was found smashed against rocks with no one aboard, she prayed her missing family members were still alive.
Her father, the Rev. Tom Starr, 67, and his three grandsons, all from the Spokane area, disappeared Aug. 29, 2001, and were presumed to have died when their boat capsized and was smashed against the rocks off Little James Island.
“We came with the hopes that we would still be able to find them,” Fuller said Wednesday. “We thought maybe we’d be able to find them surviving somewhere.”
Exactly one year later, Fuller returned to LaPush with her sister Becky Paul, their husbands, children, and brother-in-law David Van Belle to memorialize the four family fishermen that didn’t survive.
The Rev. Starr and grandsons James Starr, 19, Andrew Floch, 19, and Ryan Floch, 21, are among those named on a new marble memorial at the Quileute Marina, commemorating fishermen who have lost their lives in the waters off LaPush.
Starr, who had fished the area for years, and his grandsons apparently got caught in a thick fog bank, capsized and died of hypothermia in the 50-degree water.
The bodies of Starrs’ grandsons were recovered, but the reverend’s body has yet to be found.
Their deaths marked the worst boating accident in Washington, Oregon, Idaho or Montana in two years.
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