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Nobody was there to witness the car going into the water. There was no surveillance video there at the lake.

There was a boater who came upon the accident before the first responders arrived.

He tried to call 911 on his cell phone from his boat. But he's probably the closest person there was to an eyewitness to what happened.

On September 2nd, 2003, a 911 call was placed from a payphone at Clinton Lake in Clinton, Illinois.

We're hearing about it from Edith Brady-Lunney, Courts reporter for the Pantograph newspaper in Blooming,,, Illinois.

I went to the hospital, which is right there in the center of Clinton. And we really didn't know at that point exactly what had happened.

We knew that three children had drowned. But it was not clear what the circumstances were surrounding the drownings.

A 1997 old-mobile cutlass had been recovered from the lake. The driver was 28-year-old Marisa LaGrone. In the passenger seat was his girlfriend, 27-year-old Amanda Ham. They survived.

In the backseat, Amanda Ham's three children, ages 6, 3, and 23 months, did not.

According to Marisa LaGrone and Amanda Ham, they'd gone out to dinner and then gone to the lake.

Marisa parked close to the edge of the water on a sloped boat ramp with the nose of the car facing the water.

So he parked just a matter of a few feet from the water on the boat ramp. The kids and the two adults got out and played for a while.

After they were done playing, they all got back in the car. And instead of backing the car up the boat ramp, it went into the water and sank.

The next day, DeWitt County Sheriff Roger Massey told a local newspaper,

We don't want to blow this up into something that it's not, but on the other side, we've got three children who are dead. None of us know exactly what happened.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

Marisa LaGrone and Amanda Ham said that it was a horrible accident. Marisa LaGrone told police that when he put the car in reverse to back out and took his foot off the brake, the car rolled forward more than he had expected.

He said that when he put his foot on the gas pedal, the tires began to spin. The car moved into the water and began to float.

When the police pulled the car out of the water, it was indeed in reverse. But once it was in the water, it went out about 30 feet into the water, took a nose dive with the hood of the car in about eight feet of water.

The water, the rear bumper in about four feet of water.

Here's Marisa LaGrone at the scene of the drownings, three days later, doing a walkthrough of the scene with county investigators.

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