Local church leaders grieve members dead after Sapelo Island dock collapse

SAPELO ISLAND, Ga. — Hearts are hurting across Florida and Georgia, particularly for its church communities. Out of the 7 lives lost in the Sapelo Island visitor’s ferry dock collapse this weekend, 4 were from Jacksonville.

Action News Jax’s Finn Carlin spent the day looking into their local ties, and found all of them to be members of local churches.

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St. Paul AME Church in northwest Jacksonville says it lost 93-year-old Carlotta McIntosh and 79-year-old Isaiah Thomas in the collapse, telling us its pastors have been spending days with their grieving families.

In Arlington, Impact Church says one of its longtime members and a volunteer of 15 years, 74-year-old Cynthia Gibbs, also lost her life. Current and former church leaders say she was widely loved in the church community and often spent time comforting families experiencing their own loss.

In a statement to Action News Jax, Impact Church says:

“Cynthia Gibbs will be remembered well by her Impact Church family. Her love for God has been consistently evident, as has her passion for serving Him through her dedicated service to her church and her community. Cynthia was always ready to lend a helping hand, quick with a funny quip, full of energy, and so consistent that we maintained a staff workspace for her in our ministry offices. We are stunned at the sudden circumstance of her transition and will greatly miss her. We are, however, comforted by the knowledge that we will see her again in Heaven. We continue to pray for her loved ones and for all those who have been touched by the tragedy in Sapelo Island, Georgia.”

Gibbs’ loss is even being felt as far north as Philadelphia. That’s where Jordan Cooper, Executive Director at the Audacious Hope Church, moved to after spending 3 years working with Gibbs in Jacksonville.

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“When I heard her name in the list of people who died, my knees almost buckled. It was very hard to hear,” Cooper says.

In Brunswick, the First Coast United Methodist Church is grieving its own loss among those who died. Reverend Charles Houston, Jr., used to work at the church before retiring, but his friends say he spent time serving all across Georgia.

“He’s touched people in need all the way to the point of death,” says Reverend William Daniel, a Jacksonville native and retired reverend who used to work with Houston in Brunswick, “gosh, I’m going to miss him so much, he taught me so much about how to love people and how to love God and to do it in a humorous way.”

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources says the gangway at Sapelo Island dock had been inspected not even a year earlier. The DNR says there weren’t any concerns at the time, but it’s still investigating exactly what caused the collapse. Around 20 people are believed to have fallen in the water at the time, but the DNR says it still is working to learn how many people were hurt.

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Pastor Jerald Thomas was with many of the families as they learned their loved ones were in the collapse. He turned Elm Grove Baptist Church in Meridian, the nearest church to Sapelo Island, into a staging center for first responders, the victims and their families.

“Just to hear the cries when they found out that their loved ones would not return, that they were deceased, was just so disturbing and heart-wrenching,” Thomas says.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump will be holding a briefing tomorrow morning at the Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Jacksonville to go over the local lives lost in the collapse. His team is representing a couple people.

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