Pilots raced to save 3 stranded on an island
Cubans survived on coconuts for 33 days
He had been winding down the last hours of his 24-hour shift when the pilot’s eyes caught something flapping in the wind some two miles away and 500 feet below on what should have been an uninhabited island in the Bahamas.
Lt. Riley Beecher, a U.S. Coast Guard pilot, was trained to look for messages from people in need of help. Messages scrawled on the sand. Words formed by large rocks. But this was a new one: A giant flag flapping in the wind.
So Beecher dropped the plane some 300 feet and circled back around the western side of Anguilla Cay in the Florida Straits. Sure enough, there were people furiously racing around waving flags of white and black. They clearly needed help.
The crew on the plane dropped a so-called “radio bag,” a communication device, and began hearing the group’s stunning story of survival. In an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the pilots behind the rescue recalled on Wednesday how they raced to get them all aid.
After the team began talking with the survivors through the device,
Beecher learned, in Spanish, how two men and a woman were stranded on the deserted island for more than 30 days after running into bad weather on a boat. The three swam to the island, stranded some 45 miles from their home in Cuba.
On the island they survived mostly on coconuts.
Beecher and another pilot who came to their aid learned it was just the three of them, so no need to scour the water and surrounding islands for anyone else.
The three survivors all had signs of living under the harsh sun by day and the fierce winds and cold that can rip through the middle of the sea in the winter. The woman was in distress, showing signs of low blood sugar. She needed sugar quickly.
The Cubans, whose names weren’t released, were taken to Lower Keys Medical Center on Tuesday. And by Wednesday, they were in federal custody after being moved to an immigration facility in Pompano Beach, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said.
After dropping the radio bag, Beecher needed to make the 150-mile trip back to the Coast Guard Air Station at the Miami/ Opa-locka Airport. He had already been flying some five hours, and fuel was getting low.
“When we dropped the first radio [canister], you could see the relief on the woman’s face as she put her hands on her face — that they had been found and help was on the way,” Beecher said.
It was tough to leave but another pilot, Lt. Justin Dougherty, was on his way.
Dougherty and his crew dropped water, MREs [meals ready to eat] and packets of sugar for the woman. He and his crew also got a chance the speak with the people on the island below. They had plenty of coconuts, he said, and some limited foliage not sheltering them completely.
“It’s incredible that they were there for as long as they were,” Dougherty said.
Monday marked Day 32 on a deserted island. The three of them — Cuban nationals trying to flee their country for the United States — would have to wait one more day before being plucked from the island because the planes Beecher and Dougherty were flying were unable to make a water landing.
A cutter was called into action but that would take a day. So the Coast Guard also chose to bring in a helicopter from Clearwater. The faster someone could get there to get them off the island, the better, said Dougherty.
“Even if they were to be picked up a half-hour earlier, it would be worth it,” Dougherty said.
Leaving the three people behind also troubled Dougherty. He had trouble sleeping that night knowing the men and woman were still out there.
“Departing was not easy to do but we left telling them that someone would be coming to help — whether it was a cutter or aircraft — we let them know that they are going to be in good hands as well,” Dougherty said.
The following morning Dougherty got the news he was waiting for: The men and woman had been rescued and were being taken to a hospital for treatment. “That was a big relief weighing on me.”
After being treated for hospital in Islamorada, the three Cubans were arrested and taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol, said Adam Hoffner, a spokesman for the field office in Miami.
Agents with Border Patrol learned the woman was married to one of the men and that the three of them had fled Cuba in a makeshift boat with the dream of landing in the Keys. Instead the boat had a mechanical failure.
“Thankfully, our U.S. Coast Guard partners arrived in time to safely rescue the group of individuals. We continue to warn migrants about the dangers associated with traveling by sea,” Hoffner said.
The “Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act” advancing through the Florida Legislature is an assault on our democracy. Not only does it fail to advance public safety, it addresses none of the urgent policy needs of our communities.
Florida will soon pass 30,000 deaths and two million infections from COVID-19. More than 600,000 Floridians are looking for work. Our schools desperately need help sorting out funding issues. Our government’s priorities should reflect these issues. It is bizarre and alarming that Gov. DeSantis and legislative leaders introduced this “anti-protest bill” as House Bill 1 — their top priority for the legislative session. The bill does nothing to create jobs, make us healthier or build a better school system. Instead, it pays only lip service to public safety and erodes basic freedoms.
All across Florida, last year’s public demonstrations were almost entirely within the bounds of free speech and peaceful assembly. These demonstrations were filled with passionate signs and slogans, not broken windows or bones. That’s something Americans have supported since our founding day.
During these demonstrations, some participants crossed the line into criminal activity. They damaged property, harassed people and some even attacked law enforcement. Existing laws already give police and prosecutors the tools to hold looters and rioters accountable. Here in Hillsborough County, my office is prosecuting more than 120 people for more than 260 separate criminal charges of looting, burglary, theft and attacking police. Most of the cases stem from a single night of widespread unrest in Tampa on May 30. Two-thirds of these charges are felonies, each carrying a potential penalty of at least five years in prison if convicted.
Protesting for justice is part of the fabric of America and has been since the Boston Tea Party. America became a more perfect union thanks in large part to the peaceful protests of the suffrage and civil rights movements. Whether your ideological leanings are left, right or center, you should worry about government taking steps toward criminalizing peaceful assembly and free speech.
Nothing in this new legislation would help protect public safety: It does not give prosecutors a tool we currently lack, and it does not help law enforcement achieve the difficult balance required when policing a mostly, but not entirely, peaceful demonstration. It certainly would not have prevented the one night of looting and destruction we saw in Tampa and other Florida cities. It would, however, be a big step toward criminalizing and discouraging dissent and peaceful assembly and make it harder for anyone of any political persuasion to hold a peaceful protest without risking that they might run afoul of the law and be arrested after doing nothing wrong.
The bill also yanks away local control of your community’s public safety budget, allowing the governor and one Cabinet member to reject a city or county budget if that budget shifts any amount of money away from the police budget. Your town council could unanimously vote for a change your community and police chief all want — e.g. reducing the police budget by $1 in a year where a global pandemic has forced millions of dollars of cuts to other essential services — but the final say is in the hands of just two people in Tallahassee. That works against commonsense efforts to ease how much we require law enforcement to handle in our communities, where they now serve as everything from dog catcher to crisis counselor, and it’s an assault on the principle of local control. Communities should be able to determine, through local leadership, how to address the issues that affect their community — including the budget for local law enforcement. This has been a cornerstone of democracy for centuries.
This “anti-protest bill” is full of solutions in search of a problem. It stifles free speech. It takes away your community’s control. It tries to tear a couple corners off the Constitution. And for what — possibly slightly longer sentences for crimes that are already being prosecuted?
More importantly, our state’s leaders’ fascination with this bill reveals that their priorities are all wrong. These are difficult times with difficult problems facing hard-working, patriotic Floridians. They deserve real solutions to actual issues, not political theater. If our elected leaders focused on what Floridians really need — steps to create jobs, fix the unemployment system and effectively roll out vaccines — they would do far more to strengthen our communities than this bad bill ever will.
Andrew Warren is the state attorney for Hillsborough County.