Boat believed to be carrying migrants capsizes off San Diego, leaving 3 dead and 9 missing
Three people are dead and several others are unaccounted for after a boat washed ashore near the San Diego area Monday morning, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Crews responded to a report of an overturned vessel off the coast of Del Mar around 6:30 a.m., officials said.
When they arrived, they found three deceased individuals and four survivors in need of medical care. Nine other people remain unaccounted for. None of them have been identified.
Hospital officials said among the four survivors were three females and one male. Three of the survivors are in their 30s, and one is a teenager. They were all being treated for respiratory-related issues.
U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Chris Sappey said it was unclear where the boat was coming from before it flipped shortly after sunrise, about 35 miles north of the Mexico border. He described the vessel as a panga. Pangas are open fishing boats commonly used by smugglers.
“They were not tourists,” Sappey said of the 16 people on board. “They are believed to be migrants.”
Several agencies were at the scene, searching the waters for those missing individuals.
A bulldozer moved the panga on the beach as the search was underway. The fiberglass dinghy, over 20 feet long, had scuffed blue paint and wooden planks for seats. Inside the boat were a pair of running shoes, more than a dozen life vests, an empty waterproof cellphone bag, and various water bottles. Its single engine was visibly damaged.
“It started coming in, a wave came behind, you see the nose dive a little bit, and I knew it was kind of over at that point. And then it capsized,” witness Dan Connor said.
He shared a video of the boat flipping north of Torrey Pines State Beach just after sunrise, sending everyone on board into the water.
“I was trying to see if there were people, and then eventually I saw some people in the water. I didn’t know how many, but it was just very unfortunate, ” Connor said. “I don’t know where they came from. It doesn’t matter to me, but when you see somebody in distress like that, it’s just really jarring,” Connor said.
Smuggling off the California coast has long been a risky alternative for migrants to avoid heavily guarded land borders. Small boats with single or twin engines known as “pangas” leave from the Mexican coast in the dead of night, sometimes charting hundreds of miles north.
In 2023, eight people were killed when two migrant smuggling boats approached a San Diego beach amid heavy fog. One boat capsized in the surf. It was one of the deadliest maritime smuggling cases in waters off the U.S. coast.
