WILLEMSTAD – The death of a U.S. tourist at Playa Kalki last Saturday is drawing renewed attention after an eyewitness account described a sequence of events that differs in several respects from the initial police report.
According to the official statement released by the Korps Politie Curaçao, the emergency dispatch center received a call at around 11:05 a.m. on March 7 reporting that a tourist swimming in the sea was no longer responding.
Police units from the Barber station and officers from the tourist police unit responded to the scene. The report stated that the man was removed from the water and later pronounced dead by ambulance personnel. A police doctor subsequently determined that the cause of death was natural.
Eyewitness account
However, an eyewitness who was present during the incident described a different timeline of events.
According to the witness, the 71-year-old tourist had arrived at Playa Kalki as part of a snorkeling excursion from a cruise ship visiting Curaçao. The man was reportedly already pulled from the water by family members before police or ambulance services arrived.
The witness said that four people on the beach began performing CPR and administered oxygen while waiting for emergency responders.
Police officers reportedly arrived about ten minutes after the incident but did not attempt resuscitation, according to the account. One officer took statements while others remained at a distance.
The eyewitness also stated that the ambulance arrived later from the Curaçao Medical Center rather than from the closer Barber area. In this version of events, it took about 45 minutes for the ambulance to reach the beach.
According to the same account, the body of the tourist remained at the location for several hours before being removed from the beach.
Unanswered questions
The official police report does not mention resuscitation attempts by family members or bystanders and does not specify the response time for the ambulance.
So far, the Curaçao Police Force has not responded publicly to the eyewitness account.
As a result, several aspects of the incident remain unclear, and the details described by witnesses appear to differ from parts of the initial official statement.