A look back: Man and woman trapped in truck among first in Macon to die in flood of 1994
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in The Telegraph in 1999 for the 5-year anniversary of the flood.
To Monty Folsom and his girlfriend, Lisa Jane Sheppard, the submerged Pio Nono Plaza parking lot couldn’t have looked like much of a match for his old Chevy.
Folsom, 35, had grown up in south Macon.
He knew his way through that lot, which stretched from a Bank South up on Pio Nono Avenue down to a tire shop fronting Rocky Creek Road. Folks cut through all the time.
But that night, Rocky Creek churned deadly.
Wrecker driver Tracy Ford was towing stranded cars out of knee-high water when Folsom’s pickup boated past him, maybe 10 feet away, just across from the McDonald’s and the Piggly Wiggly.
“The water couldn’t have been more than a foot or so deep,” Ford remembers. But then Folsom’s Chevy appeared to float. And spin.
“Like you see in a bathtub, like you see when you uncork the drain,” Ford says of the sight that sent him racing to help the man and the woman in the truck.
Bibb County Coroner’s Case No. 15-398-94 tells what happened next: “The woman was halfway out of the window when the truck turned around twice and disappeared under the water.”
Not only did it sink, a ripping current crammed it whole into an 8-foot-round drain that ran under five lanes of Rocky Creek Road.
Folsom’s brother, Miki, recalls, “It physically smashed the truck. It had to cave in the whole hood to shove it through.”
Sheppard’s body was pulled from the torrent the next morning. A 26-year-old mother of five from Telfair County, her children’s names were etched on her shoulder next to a tattoo of a flower.
Folsom, who had a son and a daughter, drowned in his truck.
His family found out he was dead when a crane hoisted his pickup out of the water on the midday TV news.