A Tennessee nurse died while searching for a man stranded in the waters of Hurricane Helene

Like the Hurricane Helene powered waters When Boone McCrary, his girlfriend, and his chocolate lab got up around Tennessee’s Nolichucky River, they set out on his fishing boat to search for a man stranded by floodwaters that leveled his home. But thick debris in the water blocked the boat’s engine, and without power the boat struck a bridge support and capsized.

McCrary and his dog Moss never made it out of the water alive.

Search teams found McCrary’s boat and his dog’s body two days later, but it took four days to find McCrary, an emergency room nurse whose passion was being on his boat in that river. His girlfriend, Santana Ray, held on to a branch for hours before rescuers reached her.

David Boutin, the man who wanted to save McCrary, was distraught when he later learned that McCrary had died trying to save him.

“I have never seen anyone risk their life for me,” Boutin told The Associated Press. “From what I heard, he’d always been like that. He’s my guardian angel, that’s for sure.’

The 46-year-old recalled how the force of the water swept him out the front door and ripped his dog Buddy – “My best friend, all I have” – from his arms. Boutin was rescued by another team after clinging to tree branches in the raging river for six hours. Buddy is still missing and Boutin knows he couldn’t have survived.

McCrary was one of them minimum 225 people Deaths were confirmed Friday in six states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia — after Hurricane Helene brought rough waters and falling trees to the region. That number included 114 deaths in North Carolina only.

Officials said they expected the death toll to rise further as recovery efforts continued. A spokesperson for the Asheville Police Department told CBS News in an email late Friday that it was also “actively working on 75 missing persons cases.” The spokesman said a total of 50 people had been reported missing since Helene struck, but 270 of them had been located.

McCrary was among a group of first responders who died while trying to save others. The hurricane caused significant damage in nearby Unicoi County, where flooding swept away 11 workers in a plastic factory and forced a rescue mission at a hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

An avid hunter and fisherman, McCrary spent his time boating the waterways that wind around Greenville, Tennessee. When the hurricane hit, the 32-year-old asked friends on Facebook if anyone needed help, his sister Laura Harville said. That’s how he met Boutin.

McCrary, his girlfriend and Moss the dog launched into a flooded neighborhood around 7 p.m. on September 27 and approached Boutin’s location, but the debris-strewn floodwaters clogged the boat’s jet engine. Despite pushing and pulling the accelerator, McCrary was unable to clear the mess and crashed into the bridge about two hours after the rescue attempt.

“I got the first call at 8:56 p.m. and I was a nervous wreck,” Harville said. She walked to the bridge and started walking along the banks.

Harville organized hundreds of volunteers who used drones, thermal cameras, binoculars and hunting dogs to scour the muddy banks, fend off copperhead snakes, trudge through knee-high mud and fight through tangled branches. Harville collected items that bore McCrary’s scent—a pillowcase, sock, and insoles from his nursing shoes—and placed them in mason jars for the canines to smell.

A drone operator spotted the boat on Sunday. They found Moss dead nearby, but there was no sign of McCrary.

Searchers had no luck Monday, “but on Tuesday they saw vultures flying,” Harville said. That’s how they found McCrary’s body, about 22 miles from the bridge where the boat capsized, she said.

The force of the flood waters carried McCrary under two other bridges, under the highway and over the Nolichucky Dam, she said. The Tennessee Valley Authority said about 1.3 million gallons of water per second flowed over the dam the night McCrary was swept away, more than double the dam’s last regulated flow nearly half a century ago.

Boutin, 46, isn’t sure where he’ll go next. He is staying with his son for a few days and then hopes to get a hotel voucher.

He didn’t learn about McCrary’s fate until the day after he was rescued.

“When the news broke, I didn’t know how to take it,” Boutin told the AP. “I wish I could thank him for giving his life for me.”

Dozens of McCrary’s colleagues at Greenville Community Hospital have posted tributes to him, recalling his kindness and compassion and his desire to help others. He “was adamant about living life to the fullest and making sure you didn’t forget your fellow man and that you helped each other,” Harville said.

McCrary’s last TikTok video posted before the hurricane shows him speeding along the surface of rushing muddy water to the tune “Wanted Dead or Alive.” He wrote a message at the bottom that read:

‘Some people have asked if I had a ‘death wish’. The truth is that I have a ‘life wish’. I need to feel life flowing through my veins. One thing about me is that I might be ‘crazy’. Maybe a little reckless at times, but when the time comes to put me in the ground, you can say I’ve lived it. absolutely.”