Body of Missing Man Found at Sea

The lifeless body of fifty-eighty-year-old Cecil Lewis was recovered at sea by a team of coast guard officers earlier today.  Lewis was on a barge heading to Caye Chapel on Sunday when he went overboard.  It wasn’t until other crew members arrived at their destination that they realized Lewis was missing.  Despite a search effort, Lewis’ body was not found until this morning.  Rear Admiral Elton Bennett, of the Belize Coast Guard, spoke with News Five by phone this afternoon.

 

On the phone: Rear Admiral Elton Bennett, Commandant, Belize Coast Guard

“This morning, our search team located the body of Mr. Lewis just a few miles northwest of… his body was trapped around the mangroves in that area, the exact area that we calculated as the search area, the most likely location where it would be.  So we were searching over the past few days and this morning and we were able to locate his body.  We called in the forensics team who went out there to process the scene.  Then, they will conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death.”

 

 

Paul Lopez

“Was there a particular piece of information that led you all to that specific area or to the discovery this morning since you have been searching for some time?”

 

Elton Bennett

“Yes, it is search planning.  When a person falls from out of a vessel and he’s in the water, there is a calculation to determine where drift would take the body, hence the reason why we were in that specific area.  If he would have drowned, indeed, then he would have been subsurface for the past two days and his body would have come up sometime today.  So that was the area that we were focusing on, based on search planning.”