Authorities said Friday they have recovered the body of another one of the construction workers presumed to have been killed in the Baltimore bridge collapse.
His brother, Carlos Alexis Suazo Sandoval, said family members received the news from officials shortly thereafter. “That was the #1 goal,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message in Spanish. “Thank God.”
Authorities said previously that six construction workers who had been repairing potholes on the Key Bridge — including Suazo Sandoval — were believed to have fallen to their deaths after a ship crashed into the span last week, collapsing it. The bodies of two of the workers — Alejandro Hernández Fuentes, 35, of Baltimore, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Dundalk, Md. — had already been recovered last week, and authorities were searching for four more.
It was not clear whether any other bodies had been pulled out of the water Friday. Col. Roland L. Butler Jr., superintendent of the Maryland Department of State Police, said in a statement Friday evening that “there are families still waiting to hear if we have found their loved one.”
“I can promise you, we are fully committed to finding closure for each of these families,” Butler said.
Suazo Sandoval’s nephew, Hector Guardado, had previously told The Washington Post that the family hoped to bring his uncle’s body back to his hometown in Honduras for a burial there.
A father of two and avid fan of the soccer team F.C. Motagua, Suazo Sandoval was remembered by family members as an entrepreneurial family man who sent money back to Honduras to buy medicine for sick relatives, birthday cakes for celebrations and soccer uniforms for kids from across his town. He also helped family members open a small hotel there.
“We have been anguished as a family,” Guardado said in an interview in Spanish on Friday. The news the family received from authorities around midday, he said, was “hard, but at the same time comforting.”
“The only thing that we asked at the end is that his body could be found,” he added.
Suazo Sandoval’s body was with a medical examiner and would then be handed off to a funeral home and then to family members in Maryland over the weekend, Guardado said. The family’s goal was to repatriate his body back to his hometown, Azacualpa, in Honduras’s mountainous western region “and say goodbye to him with dignity, the way that he deserved,” Guardado said.
Suazo Sandoval had left Honduras for the United States nearly two decades ago and had long hoped to return to visit his family.
“The town is awaiting him. The town is expecting for its native son to return,” Guardado said. “From here on out, the story changes, and we hope to bring my uncle to his homeland, for him to be buried here.”
Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report.
