His brother, Carlos Alexis Suazo Sandoval, said family members soon received word from authorities. “That's the #1 goal,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message in Spanish. “Thank God.”
Six construction workers repairing sinkholes on the Key Bridge — including Suazo Sandoval — are believed to have died when a ship capsized last week, authorities said. The bodies of two workers — Alejandro Hernández Fuentes, 35, of Baltimore, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Dundalk, Md. — had already been recovered last week, and authorities were searching for four others.
It was unclear if any other bodies had been pulled from the water on Friday. Maryland State Police Superintendent Col. Roland L. “Families are still waiting to hear if we have found their loved one,” Butler Jr. said in a statement Friday evening.
“I assure you, we are fully committed to finding closure for each of these families,” Butler said.
Suazo Sandoval's nephew, Hector Guardado, previously told The Washington Post that the family hopes to bury his uncle's body in his hometown in Honduras.
A father of two children and an ardent fan of the football team FC Motagua, Suazo Sandoval is remembered by family members as an entrepreneurial family man in his town. He helped family members open a small hotel there.
“We are pained as a family,” Guardado said in an interview in Spanish on Friday. The news the family received from authorities around noon was “tough, but comforting at the same time,” he said.
“The only thing we asked at the end was to find his body,” he added.
Suazo Sandoval's body was with a medical examiner and will be turned over to a funeral home and then released to family members in Maryland over the weekend, Guardado said. The family's goal was to return his body to his hometown of Asagualpa in Honduras' mountainous west, Guardado said, “to give him a respectful farewell the way he deserved.”
Suazo Sandoval left Honduras for the United States nearly two decades ago and had long hoped to return to see his family.
“The town is waiting for him. The city expects its own son to return,” said Curtado. “From here, the story changes and we will bring my uncle to his homeland and bury him here.”
Justin Juvenal contributed to this report.