Shortly before noon on Monday a fisherman found the body of a 21-year-old Sioux City man who’d been missing in the Missouri River since Saturday night. Sinh Do was one of three people in a 21-foot pleasure boat that witnesses say hit something protruding from the Iowa side of the Missouri River at about 11 o’clock Saturday night. The collison sent the boat’s driver, Justin Nguyen, and both passengers into the water. Iowa Department of Natural Resources spokesman Mick Klemesrud says fishermen who saw the accident rode to the rescue. “If it was later and those people weren’t there we would have had three bodies versus just one,” Klemesrud says. “It was really a kind of Johnny-On-The-Spot reaction. It was a miracle that two of them were pulled out of the water. If it would have been 30 seconds later, we could have even had three fatalities. It was that close and that critical.” Witnesses say the boat hit what’s called a wing dam, a structure built both below and above the water along the river’s edge. “Made from different rock and gravel. They’re very popular, very common on the Mississippi side and not quite as common on the Missouri side (of Iowa),” Klemesrud says. “Very popular places to fish…but if you are unfamiliar, or at this time of the evening, it can be difficult to see.” The fishermen rescued the boat’s 29-year-old driver, Justin Nguyen, and passenger Joanna Nguyen who is also 29 but no relation. The other passenger, Sihn Do, was found mid-day Monday about six miles downstream from the site of the accident. “Rivers can be a dangerous thing,” Klemesrud says. “In this case, it was.” Officials found life jackets on-board the boat that crashed, but neither the passengers nor the boat’s driver were wearing the safety equipment.
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