- Four more bodies have been found after a suspected human trafficking boat sank off the Florida coast.
- The lone survivor told authorities the boat was carrying 40 people from the Bahamas on Saturday and did not have a life jacket.
- Coast Guard Captain Joe-Ann Burdian said he had made a “very difficult decision” to suspend the search Thursday evening.
Stuart, Fla. – Four more bodies have been found after a suspected human smuggling boat sank off the Florida coast five days ago, leaving 34 people missing in the vast waters of the Atlantic, authorities said Thursday.
Coast Guard teams have now found five bodies as they search a section of Massachusetts-sized sea when a lone survivor was snatched from the hull of an overturned boat on Tuesday by crew members in a passing toe boat. One body was found on Wednesday.
“I have made a very difficult decision … that we will suspend active search this evening at sunset,” Coast Guard Capt. Joe-Ann Burdian said Thursday.
The survivor, who was hospitalized for treatment for dehydration and sun exposure, told authorities the boat had sailed from Bimini in the Bahamas on Saturday with 40 passengers and without a life jacket. The boat soon encountered rough seas.
“We have repeatedly filled the area,” Bardian said. “We had good visibility. … That means we don’t think anyone else survived.”
High-risk human trafficking is an almost daily occurrence in this region. The same day a lone survivor was snatched from an overturned boat, the Coast Guard detained 191 Haitians aboard an overloaded sail cargo ship about 40 miles southwest of Great Inagua in the Bahamas.
Lt. David Steele, a Coast Guard liaison officer at the U.S. Embassy, said coastguards maintain an uninterrupted presence in the waters around Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas to help prevent high sea levels. Haiti. “These heavily overloaded ships operate without proper safety equipment and are not built for this dangerous voyage.”
Body found: Search for ‘Dyer’ continues for 36 people from a sunken boat off the coast of Florida
Fleet Operations Manager Joshua Nelson said the tow boat that found the wreck was heading from Signet Intruder, Puerto Rico to Jacksonville, Florida when crew spotted something floating in the water, Fleet Operations Manager Joshua Nelson said.
After they helped the survivor get on their boat and give him fluids, they “understood the gravity of the situation.”
The normal route of the Signet intruder will miss the sunken boat about 10 miles away. But before that they took an unplanned turn in the water to “give way” to another ship, which made the discovery possible, Nelson told USA Today.
“If they hadn’t done that, they would never have seen him,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then.
Authorities did not disclose the identity or nationality of the surviving person or the nationality of the immigrants. Homeland Security officers interviewed the survivor, said Anthony Salisbury, acting special agent.
“We see him as a victim,” Salisbury said Thursday.
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