A 16-year-old cruise passenger died after falling from Deck 8 of Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas ship on Friday, the Sun Sentinel reported.
Laurent Mercer, who was on vacation with his family, was trying to climb from one balcony to another, according to the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office’s statement to the Sun Sentinel, when he fell onto what appears to be a striped asphalt surface alongside the ship and died.
The 5,400-passenger ship was docked in Labadee, Haiti, the ship’s first stop on a seven-day Western Caribbean sailing from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. The Sun Sentinel reported Mercer was originally from Wallis and Futuna, a French island nation in the Pacific.
“We are saddened by the loss of one our guests in a tragic accident,’’ Owen Torres, manager of communications for Royal Caribbean, said in a statement emailed to the Herald.
People aboard the ship discussed the incident on Cruise Critic, an online forum for cruisers. One passenger shared photos of an area on the pier close to the side of the ship blocked off with barriers.