By Jeff Lipton
Officers of the NYPD Harbor Unit spotted the body of Jubeda Ahmeda, 16, at about 9:50 a.m. Saturday, July 28, as it was floating near a buoy about a mile offshore, south of Beach 36th Street, police said.
The body of her sister, Shajeda Ahmed, 13, was retrieved on Monday at 2 p.m. by Police Department Harbor and Aviation crews who were conducting a search mission in the area close to the Atlantic Beach Bridge, authorities said. The body was discovered about half a mile from shore, south of Beach 88th Street.
Both girls, whose faces were unrecognizable after five days in the ocean, were identified through their dental records.
On the day the girls drowned, Ahmeda's cousin Rahela Begum, 12, was pulled from the water about a mile east near the Atlantic Beach Bridge by a rescuer and pronounced dead a short time later at St. John's Episcopal Hospital, South Shore, in Far Rockaway.
Divers from the NYPD continued the grim task of searching for the girls in an effort to bring some measure of comfort to the family.
"We were on scene searching with the New York City Police when they located the last body in Far Rockaway," said Officer John Connor of the Nassau County Marine Burueau. "The family was not immediately present, but were notified by the NYC police."
"That's why we did this, to bring closure, which is an important thing for the family at this point," said Officer Michael Protitch of the county police's Marine and Aviation Bureau.
"Unfortunately, this was a very large area to search," he said.
The divers were concentrating their efforts on Debbs Inlet, also known as East Rockaway Inlet.
"The Atlantic Beach Bridge is figured to be a possible location for the bodies because they may have become submerged and caught under the bridge abutment," Protitch said. "The movement of the current is very, very strong, so it's not unusual for them to have drifted that way from Far Rockaway."
Divers were limited to about three feet of visibility under water, which has also held up efforts to recover the bodies.
In addition to divers, police officers manning two boats were out on July 25 studying the movement of the currents near the bridge, to determine in which direction the bodies may have been pulled.
Protitch said Nassau police divers were not sent out on Thursday, July 26, because of budget constraints and they were extremely short-handed, but a helicopter continued doing fly-overs in hopes of spotting the bodies.
It is considered unusual that it took so long to spot the bodies of Jubeda and Shajeda. In hot weather and warm water, bodies decompose more quickly and tend to come to the surface, authorities said. The bodies should rise to the surface after a day or two or, at most, a week.
"If it was the winter, the bodies could stay under water all winter," Protitch said. "
Meanwhile, family members kept a vigil at the beach in Far Rockaway, at the spot where the girls disappeared.
"America will miss its three bright and beautiful children," the victims' families said in a statement.
The girls, all from Paterson, N.J., were spending the summer in Elmont with an uncle, who took eight children to the beach July 23 for a day of swimming and fishing. As the uncle unloaded his fishing gear, the three girls were frolicking in the water at Beach 19th Street when the current pulled them out farther into the water. They cried for help and a police officer managed to grab Rahela. But the two other girls were beyond reach.
Members of the Lawrence-Cedarhurst Fire Department and Inwood Fire Department were called in for assistance, because the girls were believed to have been dragged by the powerful current to the Lawrence side of the bridge. They sent rescuers in lifeboats, joining efforts of Nassau and NYC police and the Coast Guard in the frantic search, but to no avail.
"It's very tedious," Tony DeLuca, chief of the Lawrence-Cedarhurst Fire Department, said of the search, which stretched from Far Rockaway to Lawrence, Long Beach and Oceanside.
