RIPLEY, Maine — What had begun as the happiest of days for Stefanie Zoeller became her worst nightmare when her husband and son’s spontaneous dip in a nearby stream ended with their tragic deaths, her relatives said Monday.
It was Sunday, Zoeller’s birthday, and the party celebrating it at her home on Chandler Hill Road was happy and relaxed. Partly to escape the heat, and to remove the remnants of a recent cake fight, a half dozen of Zoeller’s family and friends quickly dipped themselves fully clothed into Main Stream, which flows into the Sebasticook River, relatives said.
Her husband, 42-year-old Christopher, and their son, 7-year-old Bravin Zoeller, stayed in the water as most returned to the Zoeller home to towel off or change. Christopher and Bravin were soon joined by three late arrivals, another relative, his 2-year-old stepson and teenage daughter, said a relative who was at the party but declined to give his name.
The late arrivals told family members that Christopher and Bravin “were in the water together. They were fine, playing together, and the water was about waist-deep,” the man said Monday. “The person who joined them helped his kids get out of the water, and he said that when he turned back, they [the Zoellers] were gone.”
Autopsies will be conducted Tuesday on the bodies of Christopher and Bravin Zoeller at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to determine what killed them, said state police, who are investigating the incident.
It took rescue workers wearing wet suits about 30 minutes to locate the bodies in 3 to 6 feet of the murky, slow-moving water. State police have said they believe the cold water and the weight of the victims’ clothes contributed to their deaths.
Initially and incorrectly identified as the Sebasticook, Main Stream is about 20 yards across with a mix of clay and ledge banks that meanders through swamp and bogs at the basin of a hill valley where Dexter and Chandler Hill roads meet.
The Zoeller home is on those roads a few yards from a short bridge that marks the meeting of the Cambridge and Ripley town lines, yards from Main Stream. Family members said it was common for them to do as Christopher and Bravin did — to go into the water wearing shoes or boots — owing to the sharp bottom of the stream.
“We weren’t really swimming,” said one relative, “we were wading, and the current wasn’t very strong.”
The man said that when it became apparent that Christopher and Bravin were missing, one of the nearest family members, the man who first noticed they were missing, sent his teenage daughter to the house for help and began searching the water for them.
By the time the rest of the family had gotten to the water, that man had called 911 on his cell phone and some family members began to search the water near the house for the missing people while others went to the bridge and swam to the house from there, relatives said.
“It was chaos,” the man said. “We couldn’t believe what was happening.”
Neighbors said the Zoellers were quiet but friendly people. Neighbor Patty Dowse said that a teenage daughter of Stefanie Zoeller, who has four children, often visited her to ride one of the Dowse’s horses.
Neighbor Kevin Tremblay said he believed that Christopher Zoeller worked as a mechanic at a local auto dealership and that he first came to Maine with his family from New York about 12 years ago.
“They really kept to themselves a lot,” Dowse said. “It’s a pretty big family, with a lot of people there. They could come by one day, and then you wouldn’t see them for six months.”
Dowse’s husband, Dusty, said he understood from having walked the stream banks many times how someone might have slipped into the water or how difficult it can be to rescue someone who was in a drowning panic.
“Even a small kid can give you trouble because if they are panicking they can grab onto you and really hold on, pull you right down with them,” Dusty Dows said. “I had lifesaver training years ago, when I was a teenager, and it’s not easy.”
“You really feel for them,” Patty Dowse said. “This is such a terrible thing.”