8 dead after 2 suspected smuggling boats overturn off Black’s Beach

At least eight people died late Saturday night, March 11, when two suspected smuggling boats overturned in the ocean off Black’s Beach in the Torrey Pines area in what officials called one of the deadliest maritime events in San Diego history.

Officials were alerted to the incident when a Spanish-speaking woman called 911 around 11:30 p.m. asking for help. She said two boats were near Black’s Beach, one with eight people on board and a second with somewhere between eight and 15 people.

She told dispatchers the one she was on had made it to shore while the other had capsized and people were in the water.

However, emergency crews found both boats capsized and did not find any survivors, San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Lifeguard Chief James Gartland said.

It’s possible there are additional victims, or that some of the people made it to shore but fled before emergency crews arrived, officials said. Rescuers did not encounter the woman who called 911.

“This is one of the worst maritime smuggling tragedies that I can think of in California, and certainly here in the city of San Diego,” Gartland said.

(Bing Maps and La Jolla Light)

Eric Lavergne, the special operations supervisor for the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, said he believed it was “one of the most deadly maritime events in San Diego’s history,” though he couldn’t say for sure if it was the deadliest.

Authorities were continuing search and recovery efforts late Sunday morning and into the afternoon.

Fire officials said a lifeguard dispatcher used GPS coordinates from the 911 caller’s cellphone to pinpoint the location in the water off Black Gold Road, which is south of Torrey Pines Gliderport. Several factors hampered search efforts, including thick fog and high tides.

Lifeguards “arrived in rescue mode,” Gartland said, but there were no survivors. Lifeguards and Customs and Border Protection officers found the eight victims on the beach and in the water.

All eight were adults, Gartland said. But officials did not know, or did not disclose, their nationalities or other details about them.

“The Consulate General of Mexico in San Diego laments the maritime tragedy that occurred this morning near La Jolla,” consulate officials said in a statement. “We are working to identify people of Mexican origin and assist their families.”

Capt. James Spitler, commander of the Coast Guard’s San Diego sector, speaks to reporters outside San Diego lifeguard headquarters March 12 after eight people died in a boat crash off Black’s Beach in La Jolla the night before.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Footage from OnScene TV appeared to show both men and women among the dead. Authorities turned the victims over to the county Medical Examiner’s Office to be identified.

Officials gave inconsistent information about how many people the 911 caller reported to be on the boats. Some said she reported eight people on her vessel and eight to 10 on the second vessel. Other officials said she reported 15 people were on the second boat.

Emergency workers arrive after two boats crashed at Black’s Beach late March 11. Authorities say at least eight people died.

(OnScene.TV)

Gartland said the waves late Saturday were about three feet, but that the area is “very hazardous” even in good, daytime conditions.

“It has a series of sandbars and in-shore rip currents, so you can think that you could land in some sand, or get to waist-high, knee-high water, and think that you’re safe and able to exit the water, but there’s long in-shore holes,” Gartland said. “So if you step into those holes, those rip currents will pull you along the shore and then back out to sea.”

Lifeguards were unable to directly access the beach because of the high tide and ended up wading north through knee- to waist-deep water, officials said.

“After a couple hundred yards, lifeguards on the beach reached dry sand and then began to find lifeless bodies and two overturned pangas spread over an area of about 400 yards,” a statement from the Fire-Rescue Department said. “Several life jackets and fuel barrels were also found.”

A Coast Guard helicopter was the only aircraft initially able to make it to the area due to the fog and other weather conditions. Capt. James Spitler, the commander of the Coast Guard’s San Diego sector, said the flight crew could only see about 50 yards around them.

“The lowest they could get was down to about 100 feet,” Spitler said Sunday morning at a news conference outside lifeguard headquarters. “They couldn’t see the water very well, even with night-vision goggles. So they did a few legs of the search pattern and determined that the risk exceeded their ability to do a search effectively, so they returned to base.”

Gartland said it was “pitch black” in the area due to the fog and the remote location at the bottom of tall bluffs.

“(There is) no lighting from the coast down there,” the lifeguard chief said. “So without navigation lights or a plan to navigate well, it’s just a difficult landing and extrication.”

Spitler said smugglers, who are often using overloaded and poorly maintained boats, frequently choose conditions like Saturday night because the poor visibility helps them avoid detection.

“It’s very difficult for anybody to operate in those conditions,” he said. “They were likely one of the very few mariners out there at sea.”

Spitler told reporters there’s been a 771-percent increase in human trafficking in the Southern California coastal region since 2017. “Since 2021, we’ve had 23 lives lost at sea,” he said, though he added the true tally is likely even higher, since some deaths may go unreported.

Searchers in helicopters and on boats were expected to comb the area for additional victims early Sunday after thick fog lifted.

The deadly incident Saturday night comes less than two years since three migrants were killed and dozens of others were injured when their boat crashed into a reef and broke apart off the coast of Point Loma.

That incident, which occurred in May 2021, involved a 40-foot vessel similar to a trawler. The pangas that capsized Saturday night are more commonly used for smuggling.

Pangas are simple metal or wooden vessels that have outboard motors. While they can vary a bit in size and design, they typically lie low in the water and feature little more than a few benches to sit on.

In recent years, authorities have increasingly encountered pangas crossing into U.S. waters after launching from Baja California. Sometimes authorities find the vessels abandoned on shore, or intercept them at sea.

Several times each of the last few years, such crossings have turned fatal.

Last year, two people drowned when their panga overturned in November in the water off Imperial Beach, and a man died and three others were injured in April when their panga overturned near Ocean Beach.

There was only one known, confirmed panga-related death in 2021, during a late-May incident incident that left at least eight other people hospitalized But later that year, 25 people were stranded for three days on a disabled panga about 100 miles off of Point Loma.

One night last April, federal agents found 72 people on three different pangas that were either off shore or had just landed. Officials said the boats happened to be traveling at the same time, but were miles from each other and were not operating as a convoy.

“Every time they get into a panga to come northbound, their lives are at risk,” Spitler, the San Diego-area Coast Guard captain, said Sunday of the message he hopes gets through to immigrants considering crossing the border by sea. “Often these boats are overloaded, the maintenance is poor, and they often do it in weather like (Saturday) night.”

In June 2021, Border Patrol officials responded to the surge in maritime smuggling incidents by reviving a dormant marine unit that had been dissolved in 2007 when the Department of Homeland Security’s Air and Marine Operations had taken over patrolling the San Diego coastline. That Border Patrol unit now works with DHS and the Coast Guard to target human and drug smuggling.