Mexican navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge, killing 2 crew members
- The San Juan Daily Star
- May 19
- 5 min read
By Joseph Goldstein, Shayla Colon, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Andrew Keh
Two crew members of a Mexican navy sailing ship died Saturday night when the ship drifted directly into the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge, smashing its masts and rigging.
There were 277 people on board the ship, the Cuauhtémoc, which was on a goodwill tour, and everyone is believed to be accounted for, a Fire Department official said.
Mayor Eric Adams said in a social media post after midnight that two people had died, and that the ship had lost power before the crash.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said on social media that the two people who died were crew members on the Cuauhtémoc.
Mexican officials identified one of the dead as América Yamileth Sánchez Hernández, from the state of Veracruz. In a social media post, the state’s governor, Rocío Nahle, confirmed her death and sent condolences to her family. “Veracruz is with you,” she wrote.
At least 22 others were injured in the crash, including 11 who were in critical condition and nine in stable condition, the Mexican navy said in a statement.
The ship had been docked at Pier 17 in Manhattan, just below the Brooklyn Bridge.
On Saturday night, it was supposed to head south and sail out of New York Harbor, with a stop on the Brooklyn waterfront to refuel before heading onward to Iceland.
Instead, at about 8:30 p.m., the Cuauhtémoc was apparently heading in the wrong direction, having never intended to sail under the Brooklyn Bridge, said a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
At the moment of collision, according to videos verified by Reuters, two people who appeared to have been on the topmost rung of the mast could be seen swinging forward violently. In the immediate aftermath, the videos showed, some people were hanging from the wreckage by ropes, and others inched along on their bellies toward the center.
In other videos posted on social media, a tugboat could be seen near the Cuauhtémoc, which appeared to be moving backward, stern first, when it crashed.
The vessel lurched but stayed upright as it came to a stop at Brooklyn Bridge Park, according to social media video and images from the scene. Its masts appeared to be badly damaged.
At a news conference Saturday, authorities said the pilot who was assigned to navigate the Cuauhtémoc out of the channel experienced “mechanical issues.” The National Transportation Safety Board will be doing a full investigation of the crash.
The commander of the Mexican navy, Adm. Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles, said in a statement Sunday that the uninjured cadets would continue their training and that the investigation into the crash would be carried out “with total transparency and responsibility.”
“We know that every sailing trip involves risks inherent to our seafaring vocation,” Morales Ángeles said.
Nick Corso, 23, was finishing dinner with friends at a restaurant nearby when they saw the ship heading toward them.
He thought at first that the vessel would clear the bridge, he said, but then “the top lights on the mast disappeared behind the bridge and I was like, oh, it’s not going to make it.”
When the top of a mast hit the underside of the bridge, he said, “you could hear it snap.”
At Pier 16, where the injured were brought, a large crowd gathered by the waterfront, and emergency vehicles with lights flashing filled South Street. Periodically, emergency workers wheeled victims with neck braces on toward ambulances and loaded them in on gurneys. Whenever a new survivor appeared, the crowd broke into cheers and applause and chanted: “Mex-i-co! Mex-i-co!”
One woman with her head bandaged was pushed out on a gurney. She was weeping. Beside her walked two companions in white slacks and striped black-and-white tops. One had her left arm in a sling. The other had her head wrapped in white gauze.
One man’s nose and uniform were smeared in dark blood and his chin was bandaged.
Not long after that, a man was wheeled out on a gurney. He gave a thumbs-up when he passed the crowd.
Octavio Muniz, 44, said he had come from his home in Newark, New Jersey, to see the ship because he is from Mexico.
Muniz said he had watched in horror as the masts toppled. The crowd around him began to scream and cry.
“It was horrible,” he said at Pier 16. “It was so sad.”
After midnight, the vessel docked at Pier 36 behind a city sanitation depot, its broken masts visible from behind a row of police barricades blocking access to the slip.
A Mexican navy official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give interviews said Sunday that the Cuauhtémoc would go through an inspection process and that the ship’s fate would not be determined until a technical report was available.
The ship — a steel-hulled, three-masted barque, about 300 feet long — was built in Bilbao, Spain, in 1981 and then acquired by the Mexican government the following year to use as a training ship at its Heroic Naval Military School. Last year it won the Boston Teapot Trophy, an annual international award given to the sail training vessel that covers the greatest distance within five days.
At Pier 36 on Sunday morning, the regal ship, with its green trimmed hull and gilded masts, sat in the East River, a firm breeze rocking its disabled mast. Just before 10 a.m., a group of wounded sailors, including a man in an arm sling and another with his head bandaged in white gauze, emerged from the back of a white transport van to board once again. Bystanders tried to catch glimpses of the ship from behind police barricades.
The Mexican navy said in a statement that the Cuauhtémoc had set sail April 6 from Acapulco on a mission with the goal of “exalting the seafaring spirit, strengthening naval education, and carrying the Mexican people’s message of peace and goodwill to the seas and ports of the world.”
The vessel had planned to spend 254 days away making calls in New York; Kingston, Jamaica; Havana; Reykjavik, Iceland; Aberdeen, Scotland; Avilés, Spain; Bridgetown, Barbados; and London.
The tour stopped abruptly in New York, where authorities promised an investigation into the episode. Government infrastructure documents show the bridge has a navigational clearance of 127 feet. The Cuauhtémoc’s masts were roughly 160 feet tall.
After the crash, all lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge were briefly closed in both directions, the city’s emergency management notification system reported. Ydanis Rodriguez, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, said that the span was being inspected, but it appeared as if “there was not any major damage to the bridge.”
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