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Ducheneaux was one of the last people to see Eagle Tail alive on March 14.
• On that day, Eagle Tail, Ducheneaux and 12 other friends had gathered at Falls Park. The group spent the afternoon tossing around a football and throwing rocks into the frigid and turbulent waters of the Big Sioux River.
• The group was about to leave when Eagle Tail saw 6-year-old Garrett Martin Wallace had fallen into the river. His sister, Madison Leigh Wallace, jumped in after him.
• Eagle Tail dived in to rescue the pair -- but the three were quickly battered by a swift current and obscured in thick foam.
• Ducheneaux and two bystanders ran to the river's edge. Ducheneaux got on his knees and grabbed Eagle Tail.
• "He was saying, 'I got him! I got the boy! Don't let go, don't let go!'," Ducheneaux told The Rapid City Journal (http://bit.ly/ZIM9xn). "That's when he slipped. We dropped him. And the foam was up to his shoulders, and when we lost him, he just disappeared."
• Wallace also died while trying to save the boy, who managed to escape the river.
• Ducheneux had first met Eagle Tail only weeks before the incident. He had been friends with Eagle Tail's fiancee, Shawna Rabbit, and quickly hit it off when introduced to her boyfriend.
• "Never a dull moment, you know what I mean? He was just fun," he said.
• Eagle Tail was the eldest of seven children. But Francis Eagle Tail-Dupris, a cousin, said his close family was much larger than that.
• "He was like our brother," she said. "The technical term would be cousin, but he was our brother."
• Eagle Tail lived in Minneapolis but visited his family numerous times each year in Rapid City. Before he died, he was living in Sioux Falls and working at The Original Pancake House.
• "He said he loved it there," Cammie Eagle Tail Joseph, a cousin, said. "His co-workers were like friends."
• Eagle Tail Joseph's memory is particularly raw. She had spoken to her cousin over the phone from her home in Albuquerque only a week before his death.
• "I can still remember his laugh," she said.
• Ducheneaux, who will be one of the eleven people carrying Eagle Tail's casket today at his funeral, hopes he will be remembered for even more than that.
• "I'm sad that he's gone, but I'm happy because it wasn't a lost cause, it was for something" he said. "It was for something as valuable as giving a life for another. You know what I mean?"

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