Tag Archives: Keith Davis
Searching for Keith – A detective’s quest reveals how one idealistic fisheries observer may have collided with criminals and desperate migrants—and paid for it with his life.
Long before Karsten von Hoesslin first heard the name Keith Davis, before he spent countless unpaid hours tugging at investigative threads and careening into dead ends as he searched for answers about the man’s strange disappearance from a fishing vessel, before he jetted to South America chasing clues, he dedicated his days to dealing with a different sort of challenge—pirates.,,, His first case, which he funded with his own savings, was a 2012 mass murder of as many as 34 fishermen in the Indian Ocean.,,, Davis, a fisheries observer originally from Arizona, had been working on the high seas aboard a tuna transshipment vessel—a ship that collects catches from fishing boats and ferries them to port, saving the boats a long trip to shore. As an observer, his job was to independently monitor the catches and collect data from tuna transfers. He was on deck, watching the crew prepare to hoist loads of tuna into the ship’s hold, just before he went missing on a calm September 2015 day in the eastern Pacific at the age of 40. A 44 minute audio report, >click to read< 22:10
The Mysterious Disappearance of Fisheries Observer Keith Davis
A little over a year before Keith Davis disappeared at sea, he sent an ominous email to friends. In it, he linked to a video that shows four men being shot to death while they cling to debris in the ocean. After the gunshots ring out and blood spills into the water, the camera pans to the boat, reportedly a tuna fishing vessel from Taiwan, where men are laughing and posing for photos. The YouTube video describes the victims as Fijian, killed just beyond Fijian waters. Other commenters claim they were Somali pirates whose attempts at hijacking the tuna vessel off the coast of Somalia backfired. “One way or another, the video depicts murder,” wrote Davis. The 40-year-old was a fisheries observer—a member of a little-known profession tasked with traveling aboard the boats used to fish the world’s oceans to monitor and collect data from the catches—and spent much of his time far from shore. The nature of his work made him an outsider among captain and crew: a tiny, isolated speck in a vast ocean. Davis often confided to friends about his increasing unease over the lack of law enforcement at sea and the mounting dangers facing both fishermen and the observers who monitor them. The video is an extreme example of what sometimes goes on in the middle of the ocean, wrote Davis. “But know that there is other awful stuff that happens out there that goes unpublished.” Read the story here 15:04
FBI, Coast Guard investigate disappearance of American Fisheries Observer off coast of Peru – “He’s just gone,”
Keith Davis, 41, was aboard the Panamanian flagged Victoria No. 168 to collect data and ensure the crew was adhering to international fishing guidelines. He was reported missing Sept. 10 when the boat was about 500 miles offshore. Davis had been aboard the Victoria 168 for about three weeks, his family said. The Victoria is a transshipment vessel, which collects the catches of smaller deep sea fishing boats operating in the area, then hauls them to shore. Read the rest here 16:51
