DECEMBER 2021 • 73From her near-unconscious
state, Desireé flinched. Pisano swam
her back to the boat, where Coast
Guard medics covered her in warm
water bottles that felt prickly on her
cold skin.
If the boat hadn’t come right then,
says Desireé, now 45, “I don’t think I
would have lived, I’ll be honest with
you. I think at that point, I was just
kind of done.”
A Coast Guard spokeswoman
said at the time that Desireé had “a
strong, resilient constitution.” The
little girl walked out of the hospital
the next day after being treated for
exhaustion and hypothermia.
When officials pulled the family’s
boat out of the water, they didn’t find
any sign of collision, concluding that
a large swell, perhaps from the wake
of a passing ship, may have capsized
the DC Too. The two bodies they had
found were Desireé’s mother andaunt. The search for Desireé’s father,
sister, and uncle was abandoned two
days after her rescue.
“I had hoped that my dad did
make it somewhere,” Desireé says.
“Maybe he is living on an island and
just got amnesia and didn’t know
that he has a family. You know, you
always have hope. But you get older,
and reality sets in, and you’re like,
OK. He didn’t make it.”
Desireé Rodriguez, now Desireé
Campuzano, was adopted by another
aunt and uncle. No one asked about
her experience in the water. They
didn’t want to traumatise her, she
says. She attended therapy for a
while, but mostly she coped by
herself and tried to be a good person,
guided constantly by the question,
What would my parents expect of me?
Desireé attended university while
building a career in criminal justice.
She married in 2013 and had a son
six years ago.
In her late twenties, Desireé began
to wonder about her rescuers. She
ph sent TV personality Oprah Winfrey
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Strasser with Pisano (left and right,
respectively, in both photos) and, in
second photo, a grown-up Desireé