Family of girl killed in cruise ship fall to return home

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana couple whose 18-monthold daughter fell to her death Sunday from the 11th story of a cruise ship hope to return home Thursday from Puerto Rico on a flight also carrying their youngest child’s body, an attorney for the family said.

Chloe Wiegand’s parents, her two siblings and her two sets of grandparents planned to fly home Thursday to arrange her funeral and grieve, said Michael Winkleman, a Miami-based attorney who’s representing the family.

“Their singular goal right now is to get home and start working on funeral arrangements,” he said Wednesday evening. “They’re absolutely devastated. It’s been a terrible 72 hours stuck in Puerto Rico and they’re desperate to get home as soon as possible so they can grieve as a family.”

Winkleman has challenged Puerto Rico police’s Monday statement that Chloe apparently slipped from her grandfather’s hands as he was holding her out of an 11th-floor window on the Freedom of the Seas.

Winkleman said Tuesday that she plunged from a window that had been inexplicably left open in a children’s play area. He said the toddler was playing with her grandfather in the “kid’s water zone” on the ship as it was docked in Puerto Rico when she asked him to lift her to a wall of windows lining the play area.

The toddler wanted to bang on the glass “like she always did at her older brother’s hockey games,” Winkleman said Tuesday. “Her grandfather thought there was glass just like everywhere else, but there was not, and she was gone in an instant.”