Bermuda Coast – The boat which carried the two boys missing since last summer appeared about 100 miles off the coast of Bermuda. Among the belongings found in the boat there was an iPhone from one of the two 14-year-old boys and plastic tackle boxes, officials said.
A marine supply store sticker and the engine serial number helped authorities to identify the ownership of the boat as well as allowed them to trace it back to its origin. The discovery of the single-engine vessel, that was used by Perry Cohen and Austin Stephanos on July 24 for sailing, was confirmed to be the one they were looking by the U.S. Coast Guard and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commision, as reported by CNN.
The boat was found on March 18 by the Norwegian multipurpose supply ship Edda Fjord, according to Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Ryan Doss. Still, there was no immediate indication about the events the boys could have suffered.
As the boat was floating in the shipping lane, the crew spotted and removed it from the water. It’s worth mentioning that the crew was on their way to Norway when they spotted the drifting boat. They first noticed the belongings and carefully saved them due to their previous knowledge about the lost boys from Florida.
Pamela Cohen, Perry’s mother, showed her gratitude towards Edda Fjord’s captain, Nick Korniloff. She also thanked the crew’s efforts to recover and salvaging the vessel in which her son and his friend disappeared on, according to a post in the Perry J. Cohen Foundation Facebook page.
“The actions of yourself, crew and company will hopefully provide more details for us with the hopes of finding out what exactly happened to our son and his friend,” the mother and stepfather wrote in the post, with a photo of the boat being carried by the Edda Fjord.
The case is still open
Last year, authorities announced the end of the search for the boys as their tracks went cold and no new evidence was found. The search team covered nearly 50,000 square nautical miles looking for both teenagers and found nothing. The covered territory was almost the size of the state of Missouri, said an officer from the search team.
But with the new findings, the family hopes that the FWC will reopen the investigation and utilize the expert resources of the government agencies, as well as the private sector if necessary, to extrapolate the data from the recovered iPhone, they said in an earlier post.
The boys disappeared after a complicated weather hit the area they were in. The boat had been previously found but thanks to technical malfunctions it was lost again and did not reappear until recently.
Source: CNN