Amanda Waller, 29, was snorkeling with a group of girlfriends last Thursday while she and her husband were on vacation in the Caribbean. Her husband Allan Waller was snorkeling at the same time with his best friend. When he surfaced from his dive he learned his wife was missing. The Coast Guard had already been called in.
“To set the facts straight, she was snorkeling with a group of friends,” Allan Waller tells Houston’s Eyewitness News. “And at some point, the three became separated. And when I surfaced from the dive I was doing with my best friend, they already had begun a search for her.”
The Associated Press reports that no one has been able to say for sure if Amanda Waller ever made it back to shore.
Terri Youngs was part of the roughly 20-person group vacationing together on Curacao that included Amanda Waller and her husband. She told KHOU-TV in Houston that the Katy, Texas woman signaled to at least one of her fellow snorkelers that she was going back to shore.
“But no one ever saw her come ashore,” Youngs said.
Allan Waller planned to stay in Curacao until his wife was found, but at his father-in-law’s prompting, he headed back to Houston without his wife.
Amanda Waller disappeared on June 25 while snorkeling in Curacao. #hounews
Posted by NewsFix Houston on Friday, July 3, 2015
“Her father came to me and talked to me and expressed his love. He expressed the fact that I did everything I could have done, and everything that he would have expected me to do,” Waller said. “He told me I went above and beyond, and it was time to come home.”
Allan Waller returned home on Wednesday. Amanda Waller had very specific instructions for her husband in the event of her passing.
“We talked about this. What would happen if one of us was lost, in the sense of death,” Waller said. “My wife told me ‘If something happens to me, I want you to live on. I want you to be happy. I want you to love again.'”
He, of course, had no clue that day would come just three years into their marriage.
The active search for Amanda Waller in Curacao is over, but the Coast Guard is still conducting what they call a passive search in hopes of finding the missing woman.
There will be a memorial for Waller in Houston in the near future, but arrangements have yet to be made. A GoFundMe page has been set up. Allan Waller says funds raised will be donated to the Cas Abou Dive Shop, which provided 50 divers to help search for his wife, Amanda Waller.
Do you think there is any chance Amanda Waller returned to shore and has gone missing on purpose? Or has she–as her husband announced on his GoFundMe page–passed away?