Body of missing magistrate found at Glover’s Reef
The news spread across the nation like a fast moving cold front. Whether by phone, email, text message or face to face, the words were the same: “They found a body.” And while the week old unexplained disappearance of a group of anglers is tonight a little bit less mysterious, there are still more questions than answers. Our coverage begins with a report from Marion Ali, who spent most of her weekend looking out over miles of deep blue sea.
Marion Ali, Reporting
Six days after a group of seven fishing friends went missing at sea, the body of one of them was found. The badly decomposed corpse of Magistrate Richard Swift was found at Middle Caye on Glover’s Reef at around two-thirty on Saturday afternoon. This is about sixty miles southeast of the party’s last known location near Gallows Point. The body was floating face down, still fully clad in a pair of jeans, white t-shirt, and sandals. Our team, which was part of the coordinated weekend search party, met on Saturday night with Alfred Barrow, captain of the “Busy Bee” which first made the grim discovery.
Alfred Barrow, Discovered Body
“We mi di search pan di reef and we see the thing look like wah body and we slow down and check and when I get fi conscious da wah body. And we gone around but it mi done well look like it decomposed di look fi burst already. So we just stop and check good dah who and we mi continue the search, but we no find nobody else.”
Hundreds of relatives, friends, and colleagues of Swift gathered at Saint John’s Cathedral on Sunday afternoon to pay their last respects. He had recently returned to Belize in June as a trained attorney and was sitting as a Magistrate in Belmopan.
After finding the body, Barrow and his friends continued to look for signs of the other missing men. Although disheartened at his discovery, he was proud to have been part of the effort.
Alfred Barrow
“Well yoh just feel good because dah five days they di search fi them people and they never get no response about weh di happen nor nothing until today we get wah lee luck but noh the kind ah way how people mi expect you know. People mi expect fi find them alive, right, and we find them in a different state, so it noh work out the way how we mi want.”
With the discovery of Swift’s body, the search intensified on Sunday. There were helicopters, coast guard boats, and private vessels with divers looking everywhere, inside and outside Glover’s reef. Other areas of the search extend inside and outside the barrier reef as far south as Punta Gorda.
And while one family has reached some sort of closure, six others are keeping the flames burning. Marion Ali for News Five.
The six men who remain missing are Ismael and Abner Quiroz, Egbert Nicholson, Ealon Reyes, Derrick Escobar and Gustavo Briceno.
