Jeffrey Bush has been presumed dead after he was sucked into a huge 100ft sinkhole that opened beneath his bedroom, causing him to vanish more than eleven years ago.
At the time of the incident, the 37-year-old was asleep in bed at his home in Seffner, Florida.
On the fatal night of February 28, 2013, Jeffrey’s brother Jeremy was startled by a loud crash and rushed into the room only to discover a huge crater where his brother’s bed had been.
Assuming Jeffrey must have fallen in, Jeremy tried to reach him and climbed in an attempt to rescue his brother but Jeffrey was nowhere to be seen although his screams could be heard.
As the ground around him continued to cave in, Jeremy was pulled to safety by a police officer from the Tampa Police Department and his desperate attempts to save his brother were to no avail.
“The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn’t care. I wanted to save my brother,” Jeremy told The Guardian at the time. “But I just couldn’t do nothing.
“I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him.”
At the time the emergency services arrived, the bedroom had completely crumbled away. “There was no furniture. All he saw was a piece of the mattress sticking up,” a fire rescue spokeswoman.
Equipment was lowered into the sinkhole, but there were no traces of Jeffrey. Experts say that at the surface the sinkhole was about 30 feet across but below the surface it was 100 feet across.
The brothers’ home was later demolished and filled with gravel.
The loss has been devastating for Jeremy and his family, including his wife and daughter who were at the house at the time the sinkhole opened.
“She keeps asking where her Uncle Jeff is,” Jeremy said of his daughter. “I lost everything. I work so hard to support my wife and kid and I lost everything.”
A few years after Jeffrey’s disappearance, the hole opened again and the place was fenced by the authorities as a safety precaution.
In the year 2022, there have been about 27,000 reported sinkhole incidents across the state of Florida, as per the Florida Department of Environmental Protection database.
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