Awaiting closure, Maynor Suavo Sandoval’s family remembers him as a happy provider

Cassidy Jensen, Baltimore Sun
·4 min read

Three days after his younger brother Maynor vanished with the Francis Scott Key Bridge, Carlos Alexis Suavo Sandoval took to the water to see for himself what was left behind.

The 50-year-old set off from Canton Friday morning with the blessing of the Coast Guard, recording videos from a boat of the wrecked bridge rising out of the sparkling Patapsco River.

“Yes, they are working, I see more people here, I see more equipment,” Carlos said in Spanish in one video, reassuring his family in Honduras that teams were in fact working hard to find the body of his 38-year-old brother Maynor Yessir Suavo Sandoval.

“Okay, family, we are leaving the scene,” he said in another video. “I hope today is the day they find Maynor.”

After a container ship collided with the Key Bridge’s support column, sending it crashing down, divers scoured the river for the Brawner Builders construction crew who had been at work fixing potholes overnight.

Two people survived the collapse Tuesday — a Brawner worker and a bridge inspector — and on Wednesday, teams found the bodies of two more workers in a submerged truck. Officials identified those workers as Alejandro Fuentes Hernandez and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera.

By Friday, the bodies of four workers, including Maynor, still had not been found, leaving families in a painful limbo.

Maynor, the youngest of eight siblings, was consistently joyful, his brother said, a charismatic and giving father of two who lived in Owings Mills. In a video taken at Christmas 2023, he sang happily and gestured into the camera, before dancing away, swinging his hips. He would have turned turn 39 April 27.

“A young person: young, young,” Carlos said Friday of his brother on Friday.

CASA, an organization supporting immigrants in Maryland, said in a statement that Maynor was a member and had lived in the United States for 17 years. He had dreams of starting his own business and a gift for machinery, the organization said. Another missing worker, Miguel Luna, was also a CASA member.

Early Tuesday morning, Carlos got a call from his sister-in-law, who said Maynor had been in an accident. He and his sister assumed it would be a regular accident, a work accident or something related to the highway. “When we got there, we saw that it was the biggest bridge in the city, the most beautiful bridge in the city,” he said.

The family still doesn’t know exactly where on the bridge Maynor was when it crumpled, Carlos said, but they believe the workers had finishing up their work and were inside their vehicles. Carlos thinks his brother was driving a van, the first vehicle that can be seen entering the water in a video of the collapse.

While a mayday alert from the ship’s crew moments before the 1:27 a.m. impact allowed Maryland Transportation Authority Police to stop motorists from driving onto the bridge, it’s unclear when and if the warning made it to the workers. How emergency responders attempted to reach workers is part of the federal investigation into the crash and collapse, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said this week.

Meanwhile, relatives and friends are mourning Maynor back in his hometown of Azacualpa in Santa Bárbara, Honduras, the town where the fruits of his hard work flowed back.

It can be difficult to make a living in Honduras, said Marina Maldonado Villeda, a family friend of the Suavo Sandoval family, in a phone interview from Azacualpa.

“The economic part and the security part force Hondurans to make drastic decisions,” she said in Spanish, decisions like the one Maynor made when he came to the U.S. nearly two decades ago.

Since he left, Maynor has sent money back home, putting smiles on kids’ faces, and even sponsored a football league.

“Maynor was a young man with a lot of love for his town, for Azacualpa, for where he was born,” Maldonado Villeda said.

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Although Maynor worked long hours, he loved to be active in his time off, spending time walking with his wife and young daughter and visiting parks or the beach. His endless energy would sometimes exhaust his older brother, Carlos said. Maynor was intelligent — he had studied at a technical institute — and always cheerful, Carlos said.

While his brother’s body still remains underwater or buried under wreckage, Carlos won’t consider plans for a funeral. “The first thing is to have the body of my brother,” he said Friday at Bayside Cantina in Canton after his boat trip.

The brothers last saw each other Sunday afternoon, an ordinary day. Maynor called Carlos and invited him over to eat. Carlos complained that he didn’t like soup, the dish on offer. They joked around and worked on plans for a birthday celebration for their sister Norma. Carlos brought over a vacuum for his brother to borrow.

That afternoon around 3 p.m., Carlos embraced Maynor for what he didn’t realize would be the final time.

“It was the last hug. The last one,” his brother said.