STANWOOD — Bodies believed to be those of two missing Kitsap County brothers were recovered Thursday morning in Lake Howard.
Family and friends identified the deceased as Andrew Tennyson, 21, and Alexander Tennyson, 19. They had gone canoeing around 12:30 a.m. on Jan. 29, on the lake south of Stanwood, according to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.
Witnesses reported they weren’t wearing life jackets. No one reported seeing them in distress or going underwater.
Search and rescue personnel and others responded around 3 a.m. that morning. They found the canoe that day, but rescuers couldn’t locate the two young men. The sheriff’s office dive team and marine unit, with help from the U.S. Coast Guard, searched the lake for nine days but couldn’t find them.
Their bodies were eventually recovered from Lake Howard on Thursday, almost a month later.
Andrew and Alexander Tennyson’s aunt described them as funny, energetic and sweet.
The Tennyson brothers were from Port Orchard. The South Kitsap High School graduates recently moved into an apartment together in Pierce County, where they lived with their three cats.
Andy wanted to be a professor and loved to tell “stupid jokes.”
“They were young and they had dreams,” the aunt, Shannon Perez-Tennyson, told The Daily Herald on Friday.
They had moved as children with their family to Kitsap County from Oregon, Perez-Tennyson said. She said the losses were “like a bomb went off in our family.”
But while the family is devastated, Perez-Tennyson said, they are thankful for the closure. She knows it could have taken a lot longer for their bodies to be found. Now they can plan memorial services.
An online fundraiser for funeral expenses had raised over $6,000, as of Friday. The fundraiser’s organizer wrote that the Tennyson brothers were celebrating a friend’s birthday when the canoe capsized.
“They were loved,” Perez-Tennyson said. “They were wanted. Our family is very, very sad. It’s a huge chunk taken out.”
The Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office will confirm their identities as well as determine their cause and manner of death. The sheriff’s office identified the victims as 19- and 21-year-old brothers.
Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet.
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