COMFORT, Texas -- Heavy equipment plowed through debris and mounted Texas Rangers rode the banks of the now-tame Guadalupe River Monday in search of the 10th victim of Friday's flash flood.
As nearly 200 officials and volunteers began the fourth day of their search, John Bankston Sr., the father of the lone teenager missing from among 43 people swept into the river Friday morning, wept.
'It's terrible. I know he's out there somewhere, his body is,' said Bankston. 'I know the rest of him is now at peace with the Lord. Thank God for that.'
John Bankston Jr., 17, of Dallas, has not been seen since Friday morning and is believed to be the 10th victim of a flash flood that toppled two church vehicles into the Guadalupe near a Texas Hill Country camp.
Thirty-three members of the group from Seagoville Road Baptist Church, located in the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs, survived the ordeal.
Searchers people participated in Monday's search for Bankston. Many concentrated their efforts in an area near a railroad trestle nine miles downstream from the accident site where four of the nine bodies were found.
As machinery plowed through debris, 10 Texas Rangers searched on horseback. More than 50 members of the Texas National Guard arrived at daybreak, joined by dozens of volunteers and law enforcement officers searching on foot as a helicopter hovered overhead.
'It just gets down to finding a needle in a haystack. You have to cover the same ground again and again,' said Lt. Bill Robinson, one of a dozen game wardens participating in the search.
As the search continued, more than 400 people gathered at a hot, crowded mortuary chapel in Lancaster to attend services for Melanie Finley, 14, of Mesquite, who fell 100 feet to her death from a helicopter rescue line.
Finley was the first of the nine victims to be buried. Three teenagers, including two sisters, will be buried after joint services Tuesday.
The group from Seagoville Road church and the affiliated Balch Springs Christian Academy was trying to leave the Pot O Gold Ranch west of Comfort when the bus and van were swamped by rising flood waters.
Bankston disappeared downstream after saving the life of friend Jeff Bowman, 17, of Dallas. Bowman, who had a heavy cast on his leg from a broken ankle, said Bankston kept him afloat for 30 minutes before he released his friend because he was tiring.
The elder Bankston, a truck driver, said he believed his son would help Bowman again, even at the cost of his own life.
'I know if they had to do it over again, they would do it again. That's the way they were raised, to think of others before themselves,' Bankston said.
Allen Lane, 34, of Dallas, whose son, Michael Lane, 18, also died in the accident, said a survivor told him his son tried to save a child who did not survive by carrying him on his back to a log in the rushing river.
Both Lane and Bankston, whose sons were teammates on the school's football team, said they did not think charges should be brought against bus driver Richard Earl Koons, 26, of Balch Springs.
Department of Public Safety officials say it does not appear Koons was negligent, but their investigation is continuing.
'It was nobody's fault,' said Lane. 'I was raised in southeast Oklahoma, and I know how these rivers are.'
