‘Traer tu bandera’: Flags and crosses make Easter memorials for Key Bridge victims
The call to action was to bring your flag.
“Los Yonkes,” a Baltimore-area group of pickup truck enthusiasts, typically organize neighborhood cruises, barbecues and birthday celebrations.
Saturday they put out a call on social media for people to join them in a show of support for the six construction workers who died when a cargo ship rammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday morning, collapsing it.
With flowers, crosses and flags of home, dozens of people on Sunday propped up Easter memorials by the west end of the bridge to the fathers and sons who died.
“The flags are the pride of our country,” Fernando Sajche, one of the organizers from the Brooklyn neighborhood, said in Spanish. “We’re hoping they can recover the bodies. It is hard for the families to properly grieve when they are still separated from the bodies.”
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The victims, ranging in age from their 20s to 40s, had come from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras. Two of the bodies have been found, and four remain missing.
The crosses planted Sunday behind a Royal Farms off Fort Smallwood Road in the Fairfield Area neighborhood were decorated with work helmets, vests and flags. Easter Mass across the city lamented the loss.
Sajche, originally from Guatemala, said victim Manuel Luna, originally from El Salvador, was a local celebrity for his wife’s food truck in Glen Burnie.
“The whole world knows their food,” Sajche said in Spanish.
Sunday crews began removing parts of the bridge while the joint command is planning a temporary alternate channel on the northeast side of the main channel for commercially essential vessels.
