4 Men Vanish After Setting Off on Fishing Trip

Four men headed out from Venice, Florida, on what was supposed to be a daylong fishing trip off the Gulf Coast Saturday morning—and haven't been seen since. Family members alerted police after Angel Hernandez Munoz, 38, Ruben Mora Sr., 54, Julio Cesar Cordero Briones, 37, and Vargas Parra, 35, failed to return home that night, and a search was launched, CNN reports. By Monday night, it had been suspended, the Herald-Tribune reports. The Coast Guard had been searching as far as 80 miles out, and an area of at least 4,600 square miles had been covered.

When the men set out in their 23-foot SportCraft, the seas were not "too rough," a Venice Police Department captain said Monday, but a heavy fog set in in the afternoon, and later that night, "the winds picked up, the seas picked up and of course it's been raining most of that time," the captain said, adding that in the current 4- to 6-foot seas, "it's not very safe to be out there for a small vessel." The rough seas had hampered search efforts. Mora's son tells Fox 13 one of his brothers died recently, and his grandma died four months ago: "We're going through a lot, I don't even know how to feel at this point, there's just too much tragedy in my family at this point." (More Florida stories.)