Survivor Tells of Ordeal After Boat Capsized

It was past midnight and more than four hours after they were tossed out of their boat into the dark waters off Malibu when Manuel Echeverria realized his friend, Julio Alberto Gonzales, had begun to lose his mind.

“He was saying things that didn’t make sense,” Echeverria recalled. “He said, ‘An animal is eating me, an animal is eating me!’ He said he was going to die.”

Gonzales was stricken with leg cramps and had mistaken half-a-dozen seals nearby for sharks. “I told him they were only seals,” Echeverria said. “He was going crazy.”

Echeverria was back home Wednesday, recounting for the first time the ordeal that he, Gonzales and two other men experienced Sunday night. Echeverria, 22, and Jorge Hernandez, 28, survived by clinging to an ice chest until they were rescued 18 hours later. Gonzales, 35, and the fourth man in the boat, 20-year-old Juan Francisco Granados-Jovel, are presumed drowned.

“Poor Julio,” Echeverria said as he sat in the Van Nuys apartment he shared with Gonzales and Granados-Jovel’s family. He had just returned from the UCLA Medical Center, where he spent two days recovering from hypothermia, and looked none the worse for wear.

Hernandez remains in the hospital in fair condition, but is improving, a hospital spokesman said.

The four Salvadoran immigrants set off Sunday morning from Marina del Rey in Hernandez’s yellow, 14-foot runabout. They spent the day fishing off Malibu and had just started back about 8 p.m. when the boat inexplicably capsized.

“We weren’t going that fast,” Echeverria said. “And I didn’t hear any collision. I think the boat just turned over sideways.”

Echeverria, Gonzales and Hernandez managed to swim to the ice chest and hung on. Echeverria said he tossed the remaining soda bottles out of the chest to make it more buoyant and told the others to remove their clothes and shoes to reduce their weight.

Meanwhile, Granados-Jovel, who could not swim, put on a life jacket that had been tossed to him by one of the men.

For seven hours, Granados-Jovel drifted within shouting distance of his friends. “Then we didn’t hear him anymore,” Echeverria said.

Granados-Jovel, who immigrated from El Salvador two years ago, had only recently earned an eighth-grade certificate at an adult education center in Van Nuys and hoped to earn a high school diploma and then join the Navy, said his mother, Maria Delfina Granados. She was both angry and grief-stricken over the incident, alternately weeping quietly and pressing Echeverria for details about the tragic afternoon.

“Were you traveling fast in the boat?” she asked Echeverria. “Were you drinking?”

“Only sodas,” Echeverria assured her.

In the darkness, Echeverria said, the group had no idea which direction they were drifting. They thought they would be rescued Monday morning by one of the several fishing boats headed for Malibu, but when dawn broke, they saw that the boats were too far out to see or hear them.

Still, Echeverria said, he never lost hope of getting out of the ocean alive. “I believed that we’d be rescued,” he said. “I was tired, but I was OK.”

He could not instill the same hope in Julio Gonzales though. In the pre-dawn hours, Gonzales, convinced that he would never be rescued, let go of the ice chest and drifted off to die.

“He just went down,” Echeverria said.

With two of their friends gone, and after spending 12 hours in the water, Jorge Hernandez began to act strangely as well, Echeverria said.

“He wanted to climb inside the ice chest,” he said. “He said to me, ‘You’re too fat to fit inside, so let me get in.’ ”

Eventually, about 2 p.m., they drifted to within sight of Las Tunas State Beach and began yelling to the swimmers and beach-goers they spotted ashore.