Drone video captures the moment a suspected migrant smuggling boat flipped over in Ocean Beach. NBC7’s Jeanette Quezada has the story.
Officials on Monday identified a woman who died Saturday when the boat she was on capsized off Ocean Beach.
Maribel Merino Bernardo, 57, was aboard the vessel near the end of the San Diego River jetty with multiple migrants when the boat was rolled by a wave in the morning.
"Upon their arrival, the decedent was found to be one of many persons trapped within the capsized boat," the medical examiner's office said Monday in an official statement. "She was extricated from the boat and found unresponsive."
First-responders brought the woman to UC San Diego Medical Center, but she was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Get top local stories in San Diego delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC San Diego's News Headlines newsletter.
The day the boat flipped, a San Diego man shooting video of surfers with his drone captured the moment the boat capsized.
“I just really couldn't believe that, you know, I was the one that was seeing it and I had a bird's eye view basically of it,” Korey Green, the drone operator said.
The drone video Korey Green captured Saturday morning shows a suspected human smuggling boat getting smacked by a wave as it approached the Ocean Beach surfline.
Local
“You see the boat capsize and you see people falling off of it…that was definitely shocking,” Green said. “It just looked like they needed help right away.”
The @USCG Cutter Active crew interdicted a vessel in U.S. waters carrying 9 illegal migrants bound for San Diego. The migrant vessel began to sink shortly after the Active crew stopped the voyage. All persons aboard the sinking vessel were safely removed and transferred to @CBP. pic.twitter.com/lCa1q12rJ8
— USCG Southern California (@USCGSoCal) January 26, 2025
Lt. Brian Clark with San Diego Lifeguard said more than a dozen people were aboard and that may have been the reason why it overturned, making it a very dangerous situation for everyone involved, especially lifeguards who dove in to help.
“There’s several lifeguards that went underneath the boat to pull some of the people out. they were trapped underneath the boat,” he said.
“Pretty, pretty scary,” Green said. Definitely life-threatening to a lot of people. Not only to the people on the boat but also to the rescuers as well.”
The smuggling attempt was one of several intercepted by local law enforcement or rescue agencies over the weekend and after President Donald Trump made moves to follow through on a campaign promise to crackdown on immigration.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump fired the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan. The service then announced it was surging more cutter ships, aircraft and personnel to the “Gulf of America” — a nod to the president’s directive to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
The Coast Guard said their 11th District, which headquarters in Alameda, California, would lead their coordinated efforts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to expel undocumented immigrants. A photo released Saturday shows a Coast Guard plane with people aboard, presumably to be deported.
The Pentagon said it would begin deploying as many as 1,500 active-duty troops to help secure the southern border, including more than 500 locally-based soldiers, putting in motion plans President Donald Trump laid out in executive orders shortly after he took office to crack down on immigration.
Up until this week, there were no active-duty troops working along the roughly 2,000-mile border.
The troops are expected to be used to support Border Patrol agents, with logistics, transportation and construction of barriers, according to U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details have not yet been released. Troops have done similar duties in the past, when both Trump and former President Joe Biden sent active-duty troops to the border.
