Offshore crew still missing, wife still searching for answers

LIZANA, Miss. (WLOX) - Three days after a helicopter crashed with oil rig workers on board, their families still don’t know when or if their bodies will be recovered.

“It’s a waiting game,” said Lacy Scarborough. “We’re sitting ducks and it shouldn’t be this way.”

Lacy Scarborough is still waiting for her husband David’s body to be found. Right now, David is still missing somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. He is one of four men who were on board when the helicopter crashed shortly after touching down on an oil rig.

“David and I had many conversations about his job,” said Lacy. “He loved his job. We knew the risk. We talked about things that would happen out on his rig, how things work, different scenarios. This isn’t the first helicopter crash, and I’ve always told him if it happened, it would be devastating, but I would always want to know that we could bring him home. Right now, I’m that person who doesn’t get that closure, because I can’t bring him home.”

Lacy is trying to get updates on the search for her husband’s body, but according to her, she’s getting nowhere.

“In the beginning, they seemed very concerned about getting the men out, but now it’s just like...I’m not really sure,” she said. “They have no answers. Everything is, ‘We don’t know. We’re doing grid work, but we don’t know. We haven’t picked anything up.’ I’m here, the other three guys’ families are all across Mississippi and one is in Louisiana and one is from another country, so it’s like, we don’t have each other. We can’t come together because we’re all getting something different.”

Lacy is told that rescue crews are using sonar equipment, hoping to get a ping from the helicopter’s structure to narrow the search.

“This device -- they’re listening for the ping that’s under the water, and while they’re doing that, they’re also running sonar to see if they can see something under the water,” she said. “I feel like when Coast Guard was called of on Thursday and said it was no longer a recovery mission, I feel like they should’ve been in the water looking with the sonar equipment.”

The stress of not knowing is building.

“I’m not good. I woke up this morning, I have a sore throat, I’m pregnant, my husband is somewhere out there. It’s already a high-risk pregnancy. I have Type 1 diabetes, and it’s already stressful enough that now that the pregnancy is already stressful enough on Dave and I. We lost Sawyer in March, and we have this baby coming in April, and I’m thrown this. My husband is missing in the Gulf of Mexico and no one cares.”

More than anything, Lacy wants to know that she’ll see her husband’s body again.

“What would you do if it was your son, your husband, your father, your child underwater since Thursday before 9 a.m. and they’re trapped under there? What would you do? The big picture here is those four men are still human beings, and this isn’t about recovering pieces of the helicopter. This is about getting those men above the water and home and giving these families the closure that they need.”

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