Friends to the end find body in creek

David Zolinas vowed Wednesday that he and others would continue to search around Pennypack Creek until they found the body of their missing friend, Saulius Kvaraciejus.

A group of more than 10, soaked from the waist down, some shirtless and muddy, trekked through the park Wednesday and yesterday, sifting through bushes and the now-calm Pennypack Creek.

They found their dear friend about 3 p.m. yesterday about a mile away from where he last had been seen.

Members of the group said they were upset with the Police Department's search effort, and some said they had to pull Kvaraciejus from the water themselves.

One friend said a 9-1-1 dispatcher cursed at him when he called in an alert that Kvaraciejus had been found.

"I saw no effort," Zolinas said. "I think it's bullcrap. It's someone's son."

"I can't see how officers didn't pull it out of the water," said Police Chief Inspector Scott Small. "If there is a body in the water, we take the body out."

There are cases when the body is left in the water to wait for the marine unit or the medical examiner, Small added, or to maintain the scene for photographs.

"His friends are the ones searching their hardest, all day and night, to find him," said another friend, Angelique Campbell.

"We have been out there all day, going through thorn bushes, checking the river line, looking for him."

Lt. Andrew Napoli, of the Police Marine Unit, said that divers searched the area near the waterfalls from 9 a.m. until about noon.

He said the search was concentrated in that area because there is a "boil," an area where the water is turbulent and churns and spins, and that the body could have been caught there.

But "the body was a long distance from where it went in," said Napoli. He said the body was already pulled from the creek when the marine unit arrived.

Kvaraciejus, of Holmesburg, and two friends had decided to ride on the rain-swollen Pennypack Creek in pool floats Tuesday night.

Campbell, who watched from the side of the creek that night, said Kvaraciejus entered the water without a float.

After he went down a man-made waterfall, near Winchester Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard, she said, he appeared to hit his head on something.

"When he came up, he looked disoriented. He was reaching for the waterfall," she said, adding that he came up to the surface several times.

"The next I saw him, I saw the top of his head. He was floating away."