LAFAYETTE, La (KLFY) — The family of a missing Lafayette man is praying for a miracle, hoping 35-year-old Jay Guevara is still alive after the Seacor Power capsized nearly two weeks ago.
“He’s a loving father, a loving fiancé, a brother, a son,” said the woman who was planning to spend the rest of her life with Jay.
Guevara’s fiancé, Krista Vercher, said the day the boat capsized, she got a call that a rescue crew found him alive.
She thought that meant he’d been rescued, but it didn’t.
Vercher said rescue crews found Guevara on the lift boat and told him to jump in the water and swim to their boat. Quickly after, the crew told him to turn around and hide in a hatch on the Seacor Power instead.
That was the last time anyone saw Jay Guevara.
Though Guevara wasn’t rescued that day, his fiancé said because she knows he survived when the lift boat capsized, she’s still hoping he’s out there somewhere, alive.
“I’m a wreck here, but I do have hope,” Vercher said. “I don’t feel he’s gone, and until somebody tells me that he is, I’m still not going to feel that.”
She said she planned to spend the rest of her life with him, and she still believes that’s possible.
“I still feel like he’s alive just because I know how strong of a man he is and how much he loves not only me but his family,” Vercher said. “He’s always told me, ‘No matter what happens, I will fight until I have no more fight in me to make sure I come home to y’all.'”
“I’m upset that he’s lost right now. He could be anywhere. He could be floating in the water. He could have washed up into the marsh or on one of the islands out there. I’m very lucky that there’s still people searching, and they’re not going to give up until they find him. But it still hurts because I don’t know how he’s going to come home to me. And if they never find him, I’m never going to have closure because he’s just somewhere.”
With every life vest, raft, and helmet that turns up all across the Gulf of Mexico waters, Vercher says it gives her hope that her fiancé will be found.
“If I find out he’s alive, I would rush to wherever he was. I don’t care where he would be. If they called me and told me he was alive, I would be there in a second. I would go to the hospital, to paramedics, anywhere, in no matter what condition he’s in. That doesn’t matter to me. For him to be alive, that would be the miracle that I’ve been praying for for over two weeks. It would be a miracle, and God does work miracles all the time.”
“I’m just having hope,” Vercher said.
Friends of Jay Guevara say he was best friends with Dylan Daspit, a New Iberia man who was also on board the Seacor Power and is still missing.
Both of their families are continuing their search to find them and the five other men still missing.