With No Body to Mourn Over, Families of Missing Fishermen Search for Closure

A year after seven men disappeared during an ill-fated fishing trip to Baja California, including two from Sonoma County, their families are still struggling to make sense of the tragedy and some say they feel authorities could have done more to recover the bodies.

On July 3, nine friends from Sonoma County set off on what was supposed to be an epic fishing trip over the July Fourth weekend.

But during a nighttime storm, The Erik, the fishing boat the men were on capsized, sending 44 people into a sea. Survivors described a harrowing escape followed by a frigid night spent clinging to coolers and life preservers before being rescued.

The Mexican Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard searched a radius of more than 1,000 miles for eight days following the accident, but could find no trace of the ship.

The body of one of the fishermen, Ceres resident Leslie Yee washed up on a remote island several days later, but seven others have remained missing, leaving relatives grasping for closure without any physical evidence of their loved ones’ passing.

“Everything was so frantic in the first couple months, but now it’s sort of settled,” says Darryl Chaddock, whose 49-year-old brother Shawn Chaddock, a Petaluma mechanic, is one of the missing. “Now the only thing you can do is move on.”

Shawn's Chaddock wife declined a request to speak to the media. Sixty-year-old , is another Sonoma County resident missing since the accident. A call to his wife Joelle was not immediately returned.

Since the accident, families have been raising money to hire dive crews to search for the boat. Some survivors made trips to San Felipe, Baja to organize dive crews and search operations.

But the only real breakthrough came two weeks ago, after a shrimping boat snagged the sunken vessel in its nets. That has revived hopes among families that the men’s bodies are inside and that they would soon be returned home for proper burial.

The boat, found standing vertically about 150 feet below the surface, has been turned over to the Mexican Navy. But Chaddock says what pains him most is that neither the U.S. or Mexican government is willing to dive down to retrieve the men, if in fact, they are still with the boat.

“If I know my brother, he was making sure everybody was getting off the boat before he did,” Chaddock says. “That's just the kind of guy he was. If it was the middle of the night and someone broke down on their Harley, he’d ride 100 miles to get the part. But it makes me feel bad that I can’t bring them back. They belong on American soil. It’s like the Marines. Nobody should get left behind.”