Search suspended for missing fisherman after boat capsizes in New York Harbor killing 3: Coast Guard
The missing boater was identified as 52-year-old Vernon Glasford.
A search has been suspended for a 52-year-old man who went missing on Sunday when a boat capsized in New York Harbor while returning from a fishing trip, killing three passengers and injuring two others, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Coast Guard said it suspended the search for Vernon Glasford of the the Bronx, New York, around 6 p.m. Monday, after combing 842 square miles of the harbor and coastline.
"We extend our deepest sympathies to the family and loved ones of Vernon Glasford," said Capt. Jonathan Andrechik, commander of the Coast Guard Sector New York. "The decision to suspend a search is always difficult. Though our active search has ended, our support and sympathy remain with all those impacted by this tragic incident."
The Coast Guard decided to call off the search after crews spent roughly 30 hours looking for Glasford, deploying helicopters from the Coast Guard Air stations in Atlantic City and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and several boats and ships.
On Monday afternoon, the Coast Guard identified Glasford as the missing person. Authorities said Glasford was last seen wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and black boots.
Glasford and five others were aboard a 30-foot Grady White boat that began to sink on Sunday afternoon, according to the Coast Guard. He was on a fishing trip with friends and work colleagues when tragedy struck, a relative of Glasford told ABC News on Monday.
"It was a shock," Glasford's cousin, David Glasford, told ABC News.
David Glasford said his cousin, whom he described as a "hardworking father" of three children, frequently went fishing with the same group of colleagues and had never had problems with the vessel they used in the past.
"We don't know what to think. We just know that he's missing," David Glasford said.
The Coast Guard said the group departed on a fishing trip from Howard Beach early Sunday and apparently were returning home when their boat started to take on water and sink.
The incident unfolded just after noon on Sunday when the Coast Guard was notified by New York City 911 operators about a boat sinking in Ambrose Channel, off the Staten Island shore and about five miles southeast of Breezy Point, a neighborhood at the tip of Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula, according to officials.
A search-and-rescue response was immediately launched by the Coast Guard, the New York Police Department's Aviation Unit, the New York Fire Department, the New Jersey State Police and the Sandy Hook Pilots Association, a group of private boat operators, according to the Coast Guard.
Four of the five people rescuers recovered from the water were "unresponsive," the Coast Guard. Two of the rescued boaters were airlifted to Staten Island University Hospital and three were taken to Coast Guard Station in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, where emergency medical services administered life-saving efforts.
"Coast Guard crews administered CPR to some of the unresponsive victims," according to the Coast Guard.
Three of the victims were pronounced dead. Two other boaters remained hospitalized on Monday, but their conditions were not immediately released.
The group aboard the boat set sail on Sunday morning for a fishing trip, sources with knowledge of the incident told ABC New York station WABC.
The water temperature at the time the boat capsized was in the mid-to-low 30s.
The names of the boaters who perished and those hospitalized were not immediately released.
The cause of the maritime tragedy remains under investigation.