Girl Fatally Falls From Deck of Carnival Cruise Line Ship

By Orlando Personal Injury Attorney on October 16, 2017

On Saturday, a ship with the popular Carnival Cruise Line was returning to PortMiami after a week-long journey through the Caribbean when an incident occurred that transformed what was an enjoyable trip into a nightmare. Just after 8:00 in the morning, the ship arrived at Port Miami and docked so that the passengers could disembark. It was during the movement of passengers from the deck of the ship to the pier that an 8-year-old girl, who was standing on one of the upper decks inside the ship, fell from her location in the atrium to a deck two stories beneath her.

Immediately, Bob Dorr, one of the ship’s passengers and an ex-emergency medical technician, began to perform CPR on the critically injured young girl. He was aided by a police officer who held the child’s neck steady as Dorr administered the first emergency care. Paramedics with the Miami Department of Fire-Rescue arrived shortly afterwards and worked carefully to transport the girl to an ambulance which then rushed her to the Ryder Trauma Center of Jackson Memorial Hospital. According to a statement from the Captain of the Miami Department of Fire-Rescue, Capt. Ignatius Carroll, the two-story fall left the girl in serious condition. Despite the best efforts of first responders and emergency personnel at Jackson Memorial Hospital, a detective with the Miami-Dade Police Department, Alvaro Zabaleta, reported that the girl died several hours after arriving at the hospital.

An investigation into the incident is currently ongoing as the Miami-Dade police work with the Carnival Cruise Line to determine exactly what occurred to cause this young girl’s death. A joint statement from both the Carnival Cruise Line vice president of corporate communications, Jennifer de la Cruz, and Detective Alvaro Zabaleta indicated that everything possible would be done to ascertain the reasons behind the girl’s fall.

Currently, no other information about Saturday’s accident have been released, and it is not clear whether or not the investigation is focusing on the safety measures employed by the ship itself, the jostle of the crowd as they exited the vessel, or some other area of concern.

James O. Cunningham

Since 1977, personal injury lawyer James Cunningham has provided effective legal advocacy to people who are injured through the negligent actions of another person or entity throughout the Central Florida area. He fights to obtain recoveries for his clients’ physical and emotional pain and suffering and pursues his clients’ personal injury cases with a commitment to excellence and impeccable preparation.