VIRGINIA KEY, Fla. – A distraught South Florida family is seeking justice after a tragedy on the water.
A beloved father was killed after being struck by a boat while riding a personal watercraft, and the man who police arrested for the hit-and-run has been released from jail.
Melanie Garcia, wife of 26-year-old Alicides Andres Yagues, is still struggling to comprehend that she will never see her husband, and father of their two young children, again.
“They took away my life, they took away my comfort, my support, my best friend,” she said. “Now I have to be mom and dad to both my kids.”
Garcia and her family are in mourning, after investigators with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Yagues was hit and killed by a boater last Saturday in Biscayne Bay near the Rickenbacker Causeway.
The alleged driver of that boat, 50-year-old Jorge Rodriguez Del Rey, had nine passengers aboard that vessel when Yagues was struck. The boat sped off rather than stop to render aid, leaving Yagues for dead.
“He wasn’t trash,” Garcia said. “He was a good person that didn’t deserve that.”
Three days after that fatal crash, police said it was a passenger on that boat who witnessed the accident that told investigators Rodriguez Del Rey was the driver behind the wheel.
While he is now facing a charge of leaving the scene of a fatal crash, it is the victim’s family left wondering if the driver would have stopped, would the father, husband, son, brother with three sisters, still be alive. This mothers message to the man who left her son to die...
His mother had a message for the man who left her son to die.
“Sir, I don’t know how you hit him an fled,” said Christina Wongden, Yagues’ mother. “Maybe he was going to die, but maybe, just maybe, if you stopped, I could’ve had a second to say God bless you, son. Go with God.”
Anyone with information about this ongoing investigation is urged to contact Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers at 305-471-TIPS.
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