7 days ago
'She saved my life:' Houston woman lost to Texas flooding was selfless to the end
Randy Schaffer met his wife Mollie in June 1967, just weeks after they graduated from high school. They'd been together ever since, with two sons and several grandchildren.
In the end, the Houston criminal defense lawyer wrote in a moving post on social media, only the raging waters of the Guadalupe River could separate them.
In the early morning hours of July 4, the river swelled to historic and deadly proportions as heavy rainfall doused central Texas, producing massive flooding that so far has claimed the lives of more than 100 people, with at least 161 still missing. The floodwaters tore through homes, riverside campgrounds and hotels and a beloved Christian girls camp in Kerr County, where 27 children and counselors perished.
In Hunt, Texas, where the River Inn Resort and Conference Center advertises its waterfront location as a "serene escape from the outside world," the surging Guadalupe swept through the complex, taking vacationing travelers by surprise. Among them were Randy and Mollie Schaffer. Mollie would not survive.
Kent Schaffer, who like brother Randy is also a criminal defense attorney in Houston, described his sister-in-law as 'an incredibly nice person' who never had a bad thing to say about anyone and always followed through if someone asked for help. A devotee of the theater, she was an ardent arts supporter, he said.
The Schaffer brothers, while Jewish, were not practicing, but Mollie, who had converted to Judaism, would nonetheless cook elaborate Passover dinners.
'She became more Jewish than all of us,' Kent Schaffer told USA TODAY. 'Everything she made was pretty. She didn't serve food in tin pans. It looked like a work of art.'
Still, being a good person was Mollie's specialty, he said, a beacon of warmth who all the kids rushed to hug at holiday gatherings.
'People would say, 'she's a saint' – mostly because she could put up with all of us,' he said. 'Especially in a family of lawyers. We're very contentious, passionate people.'
The weather had seemed fine, Randy Schaffer wrote on Facebook, when the couple turned in for the night on July 3 at the River Inn Resort, where they were marking their 46th year visiting the riverfront area with an ever smaller group of law school friends.
'They'd meet there every summer for an extended weekend,' Kent Schaffer said. 'It was always the same hotel. They'd float around the river and have barbecues. That's the way they'd stay in touch with each other.'
Around 3 a.m. Friday, the couple awoke to loud banging on their door, Randy Schaffer wrote. It was the manager, telling them they had to evacuate immediately 'because the river was about to overflow the banks.'
'I looked out the window and saw the river raging like Niagara Falls,' he wrote.
At the manager's direction, he wrote, they got into Mollie's SUV and began driving toward a nearby hill. Instead, they saw cars ahead of them turning around to rush back the other way.
They stopped on the shoulder of the road as the water quickly rose around the vehicle, sweeping it into the current. The car hit a tree, he wrote, then spun onto the road again.
'We knew that we had to get out of the car,' he said. 'However, the doors wouldn't open.'
Mollie lowered the SUV's front windows and told him to dive out feet first, he said. It was difficult; the seat was too low, the window too high. He fell back onto the seat.
'You have to push harder,' Mollie told him. Those were the last words he ever heard her say, he wrote.
He pushed as hard as he could and went out the window. The current pulled him underwater toward the river, propelling him into a pole.
'I wrapped my arms around the pole and climbed up until my head was above water,' he wrote. 'I looked for and called to Mollie but didn't see her or the car. She had been swept into the river.'
He held onto the pole for an hour until the water finally began to recede and his feet touched ground.
His wife's body was recovered on July 6.
'Mollie died in a manner consistent with how she lived – selflessly taking care of someone else before she took care of herself,' Randy Schaffer wrote. 'She wouldn't leave the car until she was sure that I had done so. She saved my life.'
