Sailboat tracking data went dark for 11 hours the night missing American vanished in the Bahamas
· Fox News
Brian Hooker's sailboat stopped transmitting its location on the night his wife, Lynette Hooker, vanished in the Bahamas, according to data obtained by Fox News Digital.
After leaving shore at Hope Town in the Bahamas at around 7:30 p.m. on April 4, Brian Hooker told authorities that rough waters caused his wife to fall off their dinghy. Brian Hooker paddled to shore and arrived at Marsh Harbour around 4 a.m. on April 5, according to authorities.
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The couple was headed back to their sailboat Soulmate, their full-time home in retirement, when Lynette fell overboard. They frequently sail around the U.S. and Caribbean, according to their social media pages.
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Data obtained by Fox News Digital through marine tracking company VesselFinder shows the Soulmate's Automatic Identification System (AIS), which broadcasts a vessel's identity, speed and position, went dark at 9:29 p.m. on April 4 and did not resume until 8:40 a.m. the following morning, a blackout of more than 11 hours.
Blaine Stevenson, a friend of Brian Hooker's, previously told Fox News Digital that after spending about three or four hours searching with rescue officials on April 5, Brian returned to his sailboat and stayed there for roughly 24 hours.
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Kenneth Engerrand, an adjunct professor of maritime law at the University of Houston Law Center and shareholder in the Brown Sims law firm, told Fox News Digital the timing of the AIS going dark is "highly unusual."
"There are ways that it can stop transmitting. Catastrophic power failure, things like that. The mechanism in a collision goes to the bottom of the ocean, something like that, or it's turned off. It doesn't just go off and then come back on," Engerrand said.
"If [the AIS] had stopped altogether and never came back on, then you would assume there was some sort of catastrophic failure on the system. But when it went off and then came back on some hours later, that's an action whereby the system was turned off or disabled," he added.
Notably, there were three more instances from April 10 to 13 where the AIS wasn't transmitting data.
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Brian Hooker hasn't been charged with a crime. He was detained for five days by Bahamian police after his wife disappeared, but wasn't charged.
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Sometime between May 8 and 10, Brian and Lynette Hooker's sailboat, Soulmate, was seized, a source familiar with the investigation told Fox News Digital. Soulmate was seized 40 nautical miles off the coast of Melbourne, Florida, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
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In a news release, the Coast Guard said the seizure was part of a "complex surveillance and interdiction operation." The sailboat was taken to Coast Guard Station Fort Pierce, where it is being processed for potential evidence.
Brian Hooker's Michigan-based attorney previously asked Americans to give him the benefit of the doubt in an interview with ABC News.
"I would ask those watching to treat him the way you would want to be treated, to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to consider that not all of us, nor you, considering your own relationships, the way you speak to one another, we all handle things in different ways," Crystal Marie Hauser said.
Fox News Digital reached out to Hauser for comment.