The families of two men killed in a boat strike in the Caribbean in October are suing the U.S. government for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing.
Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, were returning from Venezuela to Las Cuevas, Trinidad and Tobago, on Oct. 14 when their boat was struck by a U.S. missile.
The two Trinidadian men were among six people killed in the strike, the fifth attack on what the Trump administration says were suspected drug-carrying vessels.
The attacks, carried out in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean under the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have killed at least 116 people in 36 strikes since early September. Ten other people who could not be located following the strikes are also believed to be dead, bringing the death toll to at least 126.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, alleges the boat strikes are “manifestly unlawful,” because the U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict, contrary to government claims, according to the civil rights groups that filed the complaint on behalf of the victims’ families.
Unilaterally declaring a war to deploy lethal military force is “absurd and dangerous,” Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Daily News in an email, calling the Trump administration’s actions “lawless killings in cold blood.”
“These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the complaint alleges. They are “simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”
The attacks are the “heinous acts of people who claim they can abuse their power with impunity around the world,” according to Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel at the ACLU.
The Trump administration “must be held accountable” for the killing of a man who was living in Venezuela to help provide for his family, Samaroo’s sister, Sallycar Korasingh, said in a statement.
“If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done anything wrong, it should have arrested, charged and detained him, not murdered him,” Korasingh said of her brother, who’s survived by his parents, three children and eight siblings.
Joseph’s mother, Lenore Burnley, said that while the lawsuit will not bring her son back, she hopes it may bring the families “some truth and closure.”
“Chad was a loving and caring son who was always there for me, for his wife and children and for our whole family,” she said. “I miss him terribly. We all do.”
Joseph leaves behind his wife and their three minor children, as well as his parents and five siblings.
The lawsuit — brought under the Death on the High Seas Act, which allows family members to sue for wrongful death occurring on the high seas; and a federal law that allows foreign nationals to sue in U.S. courts over alleged human rights violations — seeks accountability for the killings, a finding that they were unlawful, and compensation for the families.
