A woman who lost nine members of her family in a tragic tourist boat accident in Missouri on Thursday says she and other passengers were told by the captain not to grab their life jackets. “My husband would want me to say this. He would want the world to know that on this boat we were on, the captain had told us, ‘Don’t worry about grabbing the life jackets—you won’t need them.’ So nobody grabbed them as we listened to the captain as he told us to stay seated,” Tia Coleman told local television station FOX59 on Friday. She said she believed “a lot of people could have been spared” if they’d had their life jackets on. Of the 17 victims, nine came from Coleman’s family. The Coleman family was reportedly not supposed to be on the boat, but boarded due to a last-minute ticket mix-up.
