Tragedy in the Pond

By George L. Nitti 

A Saturday evening turned tragic south of Jackson, Mississippi, when a local tow truck operator lost his life after his truck veered off the road and plunged into a pond. Towman Rico Funchess, serving Copart and private clients, was driving along Florence Byram Road near Finco Farms Road when a three-vehicle accident changed everything. 

The crash occurred around 7:30 p.m. on Saturday. According to early reports and eyewitness accounts, Funchess and another vehicle appeared to sideswipe one another. The impact sent the tow truck—carrying a Chevrolet pickup—off the roadway and into a nearby pond. Bystanders rushed to pull Funchess from the submerged vehicle, and paramedics attempted to resuscitate him, but he was later pronounced dead at the scene. 

"He may have survived the crash," said Roland Phillips, owner of Phillips Towing, “but he didn’t know how to swim." 

Phillips and his crew were dispatched to recover the submerged wrecker and the vehicle it was transporting. They arrived roughly an hour after the incident was reported, with emergency personnel and dive teams already on-site conducting the rescue and investigation. 

“The tow truck was completely upside down in the pond,” Phillips said. “The only part you could see was the rollback bed where it touches the ground when loading.” 

The job required a rotator and a medium-duty conventional, along with careful coordination due to power lines hanging above the pond and the depth of the water—estimated at 15 to 16 feet. 

“It wasn’t overly complicated from a rigging standpoint, but working in water always changes the game,” Phillips added. “We had to cut the winch cable since the vehicle was still attached when we started pulling the wrecker upright.” 

Phillips and his team used a Freightliner chassis-mounted NRC 30-ton rollback, along with a 24-foot Century car carrier to remove the vehicles separately from the scene. The wrecked tow truck, severely twisted from the rollover, was hauled to the Rankin County impound lot, where an investigation is still ongoing. 

The entire recovery took nearly six hours—delayed not by mechanical issues, but by the sensitive nature of the incident and the presence of multiple agencies involved in the fatality investigation. 

“We’re used to tough recoveries,” Phillips said. “But it always hits different when it’s one of our own.”