Family Member Recalls 'Horror' of Seffner Sinkhole Tragedy

Amber Wicker remembers her last night in the home on Faithway Drive, and the last meal Jeffrey Bush served her. He fried pork chops that fateful night, Feb. 28, hours before he would go to bed and awake in a panic as the floor of his bedroom gave out from under him.

“Jeremy, help me! Jeremy, help me!” Wicker said Bush, 36, cried out in vain, as Jeremy Bush, 34, rushed into the room to help his fear-stricken brother.

It was too late, Wicker said.

Moments earlier, family members had heard what sounded like a car running into the home, only when they opened the door to the back bedroom, where Jeffrey Bush had been asleep, they discovered “his whole room was underground,” Wicker said.

A corner of the mattress was seen peeking outside the hole, she added, and the Xbox and television were still plugged in, only “the Xbox and the television were [swallowed up] in the hole.”

Beyond comprehension is how she and her family are viewing the unspeakable, waiting in shock throughout the day, March 1, as the media staged their cameras for the next word from the on-the-scene investigators from Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and others.

“It’s like a horror movie, like we’re in a bad dream,” Wicker said, speaking on behalf of the family members, including her sister, Rachel, who is married to Jeremy Bush.

The night before, she was with those family members, watching the hockey game at the home on Faithway Drive, when she decided to leave with her husband, Thomas, before the final buzzer. Her team was losing, she said, “and they typically win when I’m at home.”

After retiring for the evening, she said she received a phone call from her sister, who had remained at the home with her husband, her Aunt Jenell, her father and her two-year-old niece, Hanna, who is Rachel and Jeremey's daughter.

“You’ll never believe what happened,” Wicker recounted her sister saying. “Jeffrey’s room caved in and they can’t find him.” 

In her mid-afternoon interview March 1, Wicker said the family had been told that there was a “90 percent chance” the house would be lost. No one was allowed inside to recover any personal belongings. No official report on Jeffrey Bush's fate had yet been made.

"My two-year-old niece said, 'The firefighters are going to get Jeff, they're going to save Jeff," Amber Wicker said. "When I got there she said, 'Jeff's gone.' "

“He was a good stand-up guy, he was a great guy,” Wicker said. “He was a good friend, he was good with the kids. When we got together everybody would pick on each other [good-naturedly] and he’d just laugh and pick at us back.”

Wicker said she has a close-knit family, and that for almost 40 years they gathered nightly in the home for dinner, even after the kids were grown and having kids of their own. Her grandfather, Leland Buddy Wicker, still owns the home, she said.

“My father [Leland Norman Wicker] was raised here, I was raised here,” she said. “We’ve had every single Christmas here, every year since I’ve been alive, and I’m 25-years-old. My daughter’s had every Christmas here, and she’s seven-years-old. I hunted for Easter eggs in the family yard when I was her age. My grandmother beat cancer in that house, and died two weeks later.”

Wicker said "the family dinner" has always been a tradition at 240 Faithway Drive.

“I came here every day, every day my family was here,” she said. “We tried to have a family dinner here every night. We had all our birthdays, Christmases and holiday dinners here as well.”

Inside the home remains her granny's jewely and her granny's diary, which Wicker said she had always hoped to have one day. "When grandpa was stationed overseas he wrote her a letter every day, and she kept them in that diary," Wicker said, tears welling in an already tear-stained face.

"Everything in there that she left behind is now gone," Wicker said. "She died seven years ago. My daughter was seven weeks old when she died."

American Red Cross representatives were on the scene to aid the family, and two others that had been evacuated from their homes, on either side of 240 Faithway Drive.

Wicker said Jeff Powell, of Thunderbay Sinkhole Specialists, had agreed to give the family a home to live in, indefinitely, while they sorted out their affairs.

"We're going to give them an extended stay, for the time being, as long as they need it," said Powell, who added that his company is an endorsing sponsor of Habitat for Humanity and a member of the Wesley Chapel Lions Club. "We're going to get a furnished home for them because they're probably not going to be able to see their belongings again."

Powell said it was a pretty foregone conclusion that the house would be lost.

"I"ve been it before," sinkhole catastrophes, he said. "But I've never seen anybody swallowed up in one before."