Authorities announced on Thursday that an Apopka boater who was assumed dead after he disappeared at sea a month ago showed back up at his home on Monday.
Bernardo Enrique Rubio Hernandez, 48, a real estate agent in Orlando, Fla. went missing after he went on a fishing trip on his 14-foot-boat at New Smyrna Beach on Feb. 6.
Authorities found his SUV and boat trailer at the city's North Causeway boat ramp that evening. The U.S. Coast Guard spent six days searching the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway for Hernandez but he was never found, and his family assumed he perished at sea.
Then on Wednesday, the New Smyrna Beach Police Department received a phone call from the Coast Guard following up on the case and told them that Hernandez was alive and had returned home.
Hernandez purchased a home in 2007 and recently the monthly mortgage payments had been too high and the home was foreclosed on according to Orange County property records, reports the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
Sources say Hernandez is telling the story of being a victim of something that perhaps happened on land, and it's possible he never went fishing. His boat has not been found, reports WESH 2 News.
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