What happens to people who die at sea trying to migrate?

When people from Haiti and Cuba take to the sea in desperation to reach U.S. shores, they often end up in the Florida Keys, arriving on overloaded or homemade vessels.

Some end up in immigration custody, with their futures up in the air as they’re processed. Others need medical care for exposure or dehydration.

And some don’t make it, drowning toward the end of their perilous journey across the sea, so close to their promised land.

Since the new wave of migrants started nearly two years ago, the Florida Keys have felt the stresses of it all. Paramedics, hospitals, cops — the first responders who usually deal with small-town island life — have had to respond to an international migration crisis. They’ve chased down fleeing people, treated their health issues, comforted them on land.

Now, the local morgue is also feeling the pressure, with increasing numbers of dead.

They are taken to the Monroe County’s Medical Examiner’s Office, the department that processes bodies along the island chain.

How much is the body count rising?

In 2021, for instance, the District 16 Medical Examiner’s Office handled three bodies of migrants who died off the Keys. In 2022, with December still to go, the office has processed 20 confirmed migrants and one who is likely part of a large group of people from

Haiti who arrived off Islamorada.

“It is a lot. We do have enough room here though, in the event we get a decent size group at some point,” said Tiffany Fridley, director of operations at the Keys Medical Examiner Office, which typically investigates 170 to 220 deaths annually, some of them tourists who die while diving.

The Keys office has nine people confirmed to be Cuban migrants in its morgue as of the last week of November, Fridley said. Of those, three men from a migrant arrival in August and four women from an arrival last month have yet to be identified, she said.

There are two other people, also Cuban migrants, who’ve been identified, but their families haven’t been told by the Coast Guard, Fridley said.

“Once the decedents are identified and the [next of kin] are notified by the investigating agency, they are usually quick to make arrangements,” she said.

DEATHS AT SEA

The Coast Guard and other federal agencies track migrant landings, interceptions at sea and deaths by the fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 and ends at the end of September. During the last fiscal year, deaths at sea spiked from five in 2021 to 65 people in 2022, said Petty Officer Nicole Groll, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

A large portion of that count is people who disappeared when their migrant boat capperson sized and are now presumed dead after the Coast Guard eventually called off searching for survivors. But searches do yield bodies, too. In January, five bodies were recovered after a migrant smuggling boat en route from the Bahamas to Florida turned over about 40 miles east of Fort Pierce Inlet.

One man from that party was found alive sitting on the overturned hull of the vessel, but the 34 others on board were never found.

Since October, 13 people have died along the Florida Straits trying to reach the U.S., Groll said.

WINDLEY KEY DEATH

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