A 15-year-old girl was killed after she fell in the water while wakeboarding off Key Biscayne near Miami on Saturday and was hit by a center console that then just kept going.
The girl, Ella Riley Adler, and another girl, were being towed on separate wakeboards behind a 42-foot Fjord about 4 on Saturday afternoon near the Nixon Beach Sandbar, a popular boating spot. They fell off their boats at different times and in different spots, according to a report from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. They were part of a birthday party celebration; another 12 people were on the Fjord.
The report said that Adler was farther away from the Fjord than the other girl when she was hit. Witnesses said the boat that hit her was a large center console with several white outboards. The scene became chaotic as people tried to save Ella and other boats called for help.
Police started an immediate search for the center console. The tragedy was compounded on Tuesday afternoon when they found it docked behind a house in a gated community in Coral Gables. It was a 42-foot Boston Whaler with four white outboards.
The owner of the boat, Carlos Guillermo Alonso, 78, was distraught. He said he did not know he had hit anything, much less a person. Indeed, he had returned home on Saturday afternoon, tied up the boat as usual and didn’t even know there was an accident until authorities knocked on his door on Tuesday. Authorities towed the boat to a compound in Port Everglades for evidence; they sent some evidence samples to the state lab.
Alonso was cooperating with authorities. He does not drink alcohol and was not drinking on Saturday. He said he was on the boat by himself on Saturday afternoon.
Ella was a freshman at Ransom Everglades School in Coconut Grove and a member of the dance team and the speech-and-debate team. An aspiring ballerina, she had appeared in more than 100 performances of The Nutcracker with the Miami City Ballet. Friends said she wanted to be president of the United States.
“There are no words that can explain why things like this happen,” Jacob Solomon, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, said at a memorial service with hundreds of mourners on Monday at Temple Beth Sholom in Miami Beach.
“We must remember her as she would have wanted to be remembered, as a star, a force of nature, a glowing and gorgeous young woman who was loved, admired, cherished and adored by more people than anyone her age normally would be,” said Jonathan Berkun, Rabbi at Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center.
Ella was the granddaughter of current U.S. ambassador to Belgium. Dr. Jill Biden, the First Lady, visited the family on Tuesday to share their mourning.
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