30153: (news) Chamberlain: Migrant Deaths (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By JONATHAN M. KATZ

   SANTO DOMINGO, March 2 (AP) -- U.S. Coast Guard crews searched waters
off the north coast of the Dominican Republic Friday for nearly 50 Haitian
migrants missing since their homemade boat caught fire, an agency spokesman
said.
   At least five people died when the fiberglass vessel the migrants were
apparently taking from the northern Haitian town of Cap-Haitien to the
Turks and Caicos Islands caught fire about 23 miles north of the Dominican
Republic. Authorities did not know when the blaze occurred, when the
migrants set sail or what caused the fire.
   The Coast Guard mistakenly reported seeing eight passengers dead on
Thursday because a pilot counted some bodies twice, according to U.S. Coast
Guard spokesman Petty Officer Barry Bena. Five bodies were found by a
Liberian-flagged merchant marine ship on Thursday, Bena said.
   A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, airplane and helicopter have not located any
other bodies or survivors.
   Two survivors were plucked from the Atlantic Tuesday by an American
couple sailing from Panama to Antigua. Authorities believe there were
originally more than 50 people on board the migrants' boat.
   "I spotted an odd shape in the water. I thought it was a buoy," Jan
Hein, a 53-year-old elementary school teacher from Gig Harbor, Wash., told
The Associated Press.
   But as she and husband Bruce Smith piloted their 34-foot wooden sailboat
closer, they realized the shape was a man and a woman clinging to a charred
piece of fiberglass.
   "They were suffering," Hein said by phone from aboard their boat, the
Woodwind, which was ported Friday in the Dominican town of Montecristi.
   Hein and Smith lifted 27-year-old Djenson Loucien and a 23-year-old
woman named Julie into their boat, washed the salt out of their burn wounds
and tried to keep them warm after issuing a distress call.
   The migrants told the couple they had possibly spent days clinging to
the wreckage after a gas tank exploded during refueling.
   The American couple sailed five hours south to the Dominican coast when
no help came to meet them. Another sailboat owner answered their call upon
arriving in Montecristi and helped rush the two Haitians to a hospital.
   The pair were in stable condition Friday, and could spend at least two
more weeks in the hospital, said Dr. Braulio Manuel Reynoso. Hein said
their care was being paid for by the other sailboat owner, a developer with
projects in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola
with Haiti.
   Thousands of Haitians take to the sea on flimsy boats each year, heading
north toward Florida to escape grinding poverty and frequent political
turmoil in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. Nearly all are
intercepted and repatriated to their homeland, where the vast majority of
the nation's 8 million people lives on less than $1 a day.