Body of Missing Duck Boat Passenger Identified

Hungarian Foreign Ministry confirms that the female body is that of Dora Schwendtner

WATCH LIVE: Duck boat salvage operation. Workers are using a giant crane to lift the sunken tour boat out of the Delaware River.

The body found early Friday morning was identified as the missing Hungarian girl who disappeared after Wednesday's duck boat accident, according to Hungarian officials.

Dora Schwendtner, 16, was found in the river near Snyder Avenue -- about two miles south of where the duck boat wreck happened. Someone on a fishing boat spotted her body just north of the Walt Whitman Bridge and the Philadelphia Fire Department pulled it from the water around 4:45 a.m.

Only a few hours later, a second body was found floating near the salvage barge that is currently working to pull up the sunken duck boat. Police are in the river trying to recover the body, but, so far, are unsuccessful because the body is lodged underneath the barge.

Investigators will determine it is Szablcs Prem, 20, the last of the missing boat passengers.

"We are devastated by the news of this discovery," said Ride the Ducks President Chris Herchend. "Our thoughts, our prayers, our sympathies are with the families and the friends of the folks involved."

Schwendtner's body was found just hours after the search for the missing passengers was called off.

It was around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday when an engine fire stalled one of the tour company's white amphibious vehicles in the river. For 20 minutes the boat packed with 37 people floated in the currents in the river and into the path of The Resource, a 250-foot barge.

Thirty-five people were rescued from the murky waters of the Delaware as the boat split and sank 40-feet to the river's bottom, but two young Hungarian tourists did not make it out of the water.

After 20 hours of searching, the U.S. Coast Guard announced late Thursday that they suspended the operation and declared the two permanently missing and presumed dead.

Schwendtner and Prem were visiting the Philadelphia area with a group of youth missionaries from Hungary. The group was being hosted by members of the Marshallton United Methodist Church in West Chester, Pa.

Now they are mourning the loss of their friends and trying to help officials from the National Transportation Safety Board uncover the events leading up to the tragedy.

The NTSB has a team of 10 people looking into the cause of the accident after taking over the case from the Coast Guard.

"We want to collect the perishable evidence; that information that can go away with the passage of time," said NTSB Board Member Robert Sumwalt.

Interviewing victims and gathering evidence usually takes up to a week. Determining the official cause of the accident could take anywhere from a year to 18 months.

"Our ultimate goal is to find out what happened, to issue recommendations to keep anything like this from happening again," said Sumwalt.

A 250-yard safety zone has been established around the boat's wreckage near the Independence Seaport Museum at Penn's Landing.

Divers made several attempts to inspect the sunken ship, but were forced to turn back after poor conditions made work impossible.

As information begins to trickle out about the moments that led up to the collision, discrepancies have begun to bubble up.

One passenger claimed the two-member crew anchored the boat to keep it from drifting further out into the river before the crash.

The crew followed all procedures including calling the Coast Guard for help, Herschend said on Thursday.

But the NTSB says the Coast Guard has no record of such a distress call ever being made.

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