Police recovered the bodies of three children who went missing in the Iowa River Wednesday night.
Chief Mike Tupper, of the Marshalltown Police Department, said officers responded to a call just after 6 p.m. that two girls and one boy disappeared while swimming in the river near the Marshalltown Water Pollution Control Plant.
The children, a nine year old female, a seven year old female and a seven year old male, were familiar with one another, Tupper said, but police are uncertain whether they were all related. Police are still investigating how long the children had been missing before the call came in as well as piecing together how they died.
One of the families police notified are Burmese, Tupper said. Because of a language barrier, police would not release many details of the search Wednesday night.
Tupper said the team of about 30 searched until just after 9 p.m., when they recovered the third body.
The children's disappearance comes just over two weeks after 10-year-old Andres Favela drowned in the river near the Center Street Dam.
Marshalltown Fire Department, Grundy County Sheriff's Office, Iowa Department of Natural Resources and Marshall County Emergency Management assisted with the search.
-from the Times-Republican
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MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa (AP) --- An Iowa police chief says authorities have recovered the bodies of three young children who apparently drowned in a river during a Fourth of July outing with family and friends.
Marshalltown Police Chief Mike Tupper says the two girls, one 7 and the other 9, and one 7-year-old boy found Wednesday night in the Iowa River were family members. Authorities searched the river for more than three hours after they were separated from others who were swimming.
It happened in the central Iowa city of Marshalltown, about 50 miles northeast of Des Moines.
Tupper says drought has left the river shallow. There are places where it's only ankle deep, but other pockets of 12-plus feet of water.
Last month, another child drowned in the same river about two miles away.
