By Paul Purpura From The Times Picayune Greater New Orleans

For four days, after learning that her 16-year-old daughter Amber Burkett was missing in the Caribbean Sea amid the islands off the Honduran mainland, Jackie Capehart of Bridge City was an emotional wreck. So intense was her anxiety that she lost weight, while her 9th Street home near the Mississippi River became the epicenter for worried callers asking for the latest word.

But the periodic tears gave way to absolute joy Wednesday morning, when the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa called with the news: A U.S. Coast Guard airplane crew found Amber and her eight companions. Capehart was initially told they were shipwrecked on a remote island, before the Coast Guard clarified that they were adrift on their 28-foot charter boat.

Within two hours of the discovery, Amber had been rescued and delivered to a hospital on the Honduran island of Roatan. Like her companions, she was dehydrated and sunburned. But she was otherwise OK.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through in the past four days,” Amber tearfully told her mother, who sat with the teen’s father at their kitchen table in Bridge City. The couple aired the conversation over the speakerphone so others in the room could hear. “I love you.”

Capehart responded in kind. “I love you,” she told her weeping daughter.

Jackie Capehart received word about 10:30 a.m., Wednesday that her 16-year-old daughter Amber Burkett and eight others had been found on a remote Caribbean Sea island off Honduras, four days after they vanished in a boat. About two hours later, Amber spoke with her mother for the first time from a Honduran hospital.

The teen’s grandfather, Woody McGee, a former Marine who served in Vietnam, listened to the conversation and smiled. “Better than awesome,” he said.

Capehart had sent Amber to stay with the teen’s godfather and his family at Honduras’ Utila Island on June 15. She hoped the respite would ease Amber’s emotional strain as the one-year anniversary approached later this month of the death of an infant the teen delivered.

“With all that going on in her life, I figured I’d give her a vacation,” Capehart said. “Never would I have thought I would have gotten the call.”

Amber wasn’t supposed to leave Utila Island. But on Saturday, in a 28-foot pleasure craft with a 100-horsepower outboard motor, Amber and some newly acquired friends ventured to Roatan, an island 18 miles to the northeast.

Under circumstances that were not clear Wednesday, Roatan authorities told the group to leave, Capehart said. Police helped push their boat off a reef, and that was the last sighting, she said.

They left Roatan on Saturday about 3 p.m., the Coast Guard said. A relative of one of boaters alerted authorities when they never arrived at Utilia.

Their disappearance drew the diplomatic attention of authorities in three countries, as the missing included two U.S. citizens, a Canadian and six Hondurans, ages ranging from 15 to 33. Both of Louisiana’s senators and the U.S. State Department became involved. The Honduran Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, Navy and Army joined in the search. News media in several countries followed the story.

Air and boat crews searched 4,502 square miles, an area larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. A Coast Guard C-130 Hercules crew based in Clearwater, Fla., spotted them Wednesday about 10 a.m., waving from the adrift boat some 55 miles northwest of Utila. A U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter crew stationed in Honduras flew to them and hoisted them up, the Coast Guard said.

Authorities initially thought that eight people were on the boat. The Coast Guard confirmed nine after the rescue. Authorities had not determined late Wednesday whether the boat engine ran out of gas or had a mechanical problem.

The four-day search could have been much shorter. But the boaters were not equipped with an emergency radio beacon that helps searchers find missing people at sea, the Coast Guard said.

“The nine young boaters were safely rescued today due to the vigilant search efforts by the Coast Guard and our partner agencies assisting the search,” said Rear Adm. Jake Korn, who leads the 7th Coast Guard District in Miami and is a former commander of the Coast Guard Air Station in Belle Chasse. “Ultimately these efforts saved the lives of these nine boaters.”

U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., who like his Democratic counterpart Sen. Mary Landrieu had been in contact with Amber’s family, said in a statement Wednesday that he was “relieved for the Burkett family that this nightmare has ended.”

“This is an incredible job by the State Department, U.S. Coast Guard and everyone involved to act quickly to bring both U.S. citizens home safely,” Vitter said.

In Bridge City, Capehart said the U.S. Embassy in Honduras called at 10:17 a.m. to tell her that Amber had been found. During the next two hours, before she was able to speak with Amber, a State Department worker called periodically from Honduras with real-time updates:

They were found. Medics were being sent. A helicopter crew rescued them and was to fly them to a hospital on Roatan.

One of Amber’s uncles who had gone to the Honduras in recent days rushed to the hospital. He saw Amber and immediately called Capehart, confirming that the teenager was walking and appeared to be in good health and promising to put her on the phone as soon as he could.

Through it all, Capehart burned through her mobile phone battery as she notified friends and family and fielded calls.

“It was a boat wreck. They were stranded on an island,” Capehart told one caller. “They were signaling for help, so they were able to move,” she told another, inferring that movement suggested good health.

Strangely, she said later, a psychic had called her family Wednesday to say Amber was dead but would be found that day. The psychic provided somewhat accurate coordinates of where Amber and the others would be found. “She was halfway right,” said Capehart, who relayed the psychic’s coordinates to the embassy in Honduras, asking that they be passed to the Coast Guard.

Within moments of speaking with her daughter, Capehart was planning her flight to the Honduras. She hoped Amber would be released from the hospital on Thursday so they could be back in the U.S. on Friday.

“You don’t know how happy I am, because I was planning for the worst this morning,” she said.

PHOTO: Jackie Capehart sits in the kitchen of her Bridge City home Wednesday morning, in one of numerous conversations she had with the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. Her 16-year-old daughter Amber Burkett and eight others had been missing in the Caribbean Sea since Saturday. The U.S. Coast Guard found all nine stranded people Wednesday morning.

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