JUPITER — The legacy of Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen isn’t just memories of the teens who tragically lost their lives at sea 10 years ago on July 24. It is also an awareness of the dangers of the waters that surround northern Palm Beach County — rivers and oceans that look so inviting but can turn so wild.
The boys’ disappearance forever changed the way that Erik Feay teaches his daughter about boating safety. Haylie is 14 years old now, the same age as Austin and Perry when they were last recorded passing through the Jupiter Inlet on a 19-foot boat.
“I don’t let her go out of sight,” said Feay, 47, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens and said he was friends with Austin’s dad, Blu Stephanos, in elementary school. “And we boat and fish all the time.”
Feay regularly returns to the northern tip of Jupiter Beach Park where there stands a life-sized statue of a man and woman scanning the sea as if they were searching for Austin and Perry. He plants a folding beach chair and umbrella next to it, looks out at the expanse of the Atlantic just beyond the inlet and thinks of the boys.
“It’s devastating,” Feay said. “There’s this constant wonder. … You basically know what happened, but you don’t know for sure. I just wish the best for the families.”
Austin and Perry would be 24 now, taller and sturdier than the 14-year-olds in shorts captured on security-camera footage just before they reached the inlet.
They paid $109 to fuel their single-engine boat at Jib Yacht Club and Marina in Jupiter Inlet Colony on that warm, breezy Friday morning, then glided toward the ocean, where a storm brewed in the distance.
In the days that followed, families panicked, classmates prayed and the Coast Guard scoured thousands of square miles of sea to no avail. Eight months later, a Norwegian vessel recovered the capsized boat about 100 miles off the coast of Bermuda. Onboard, they found an iPhone, two fishing rods and two tackle boxes.
The boys were never found. The wound of their disappearance feels just as fresh one decade later.
Signs of them linger around Jupiter, in the statue at Jupiter Beach Park and in a colorful mural of Perry that brightens the Jupiter High School entrance. He would have been a freshman there a few weeks later.
Pamela Cohen, Perry’s mom, wrote about him on social media in June, ahead of the 10-year anniversary.
“It’s a privilege loving you Perry,” reads the Facebook post. “Mommy misses you.”
Perry’s dad, Phil Cohen, said he often replays one memory in his mind: the day Perry hit a home run during a baseball game. Cohen expected him to high-five his teammates after the win. Instead, Perry leaped straight into his dad’s arms.
“That hug. I can still feel it,” Cohen wrote in a prepared statement. “His arms wrapped tight around my neck, dirty uniform, sweaty, and smiling, as if to say, ‘We did it, Dad.’
“I can still feel what it meant to be his dad in that moment. It was the kind of moment you don’t plan for. The kind that writes itself onto your soul.”
Since the disappearance, Cohen said he has traveled the country telling his story and helping others to grieve.
“Because when a child dies, the world doesn’t stop, but yours does,” Cohen wrote. “And somehow, slowly, painfully, beautifully, you learn to build a new life. Not one without them, but one that carries them forward with every step.”
July 24, 2015: The day Austin and Perry didn’t come home
For three years, Austin and Perry were friends. They lived near each other in a waterfront Tequesta neighborhood filled with large brick colonial-style houses and modern ones, too, placed amid lush greenery and oak trees. They fished together and had sleepovers.
Perry slept over at Austin’s house the night before they went missing.
That morning, Perry and Austin gathered ice, gas cans and fishing gear at Austin’s grandmother’s house before taking out the boat that Austin’s grandfather purchased for him, according to court records. Austin’s grandfather also gave them $100 in cash to use for gas for their trip.
They purchased fuel at the Jib marina, just south of Cato’s Bridge, and left from there before noon. The last time Austin texted his parents was at 11:25 a.m., when he told them he was safe and fishing.
As news about Austin and Perry’s disappearance spread like wildfire, people in coastal towns looked out to see if items from their trip had washed ashore.
Then came vigils on beaches all along the coast. Candles, bouquets of flowers and small angel figurines became mainstays on the rocks facing the Jupiter Inlet at Jupiter Beach Park.
One seafood market in Jupiter started selling T-shirts, stickers, koozies and hats to help raise money for search efforts. A Stuart clothing store had a dress fundraiser.
After the Coast Guard called off its week-long search for the boys — a search that had covered nearly 50,000 of square nautical miles from Jupiter to the North Carolina coast — their families launched their own private search.
They raised more than $400,000 and called on volunteers to join the quest, but ended these efforts when no one found any credible trace of the youngsters.
The boys’ families initially supported each other after their disappearance, even appearing on national TV shows together, but tensions flared in the years that followed.
Pamela Cohen filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Stephanos and other family members in 2017 saying that she did not allow Perry to go on a boat without an adult and without her permission and that Austin’s family did not honor her wishes, court records show.
The case never went to trial. The parties reached an “amicable resolution” in 2021, according to Daniel Santaniello, Stephanos’ attorney.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission ran a two-year investigation after the boys’ disappearance. While the world will never know what actually happened to them, its findings offer some clues, said former FWC Capt. Jeff Ardelean, who oversaw the investigation. Among them:
A text message from the iPhone recovered from the boat and revealed in court documents suggested they had talked about traveling to the Bahamas, about 75 miles southeast of the inlet.
Ardelean said that when he learned that the boys only filled the boat up with about $100 worth of gas, he knew that amount of fuel would not have carried them that far.
“The boat didn’t sink, so they could’ve tried to stay with the boat,” Ardelean said. “Maybe they tried to make it to shore, but that’s all unknown. The known is that we found the boat and no remains on that.”
Ten years later: Boater shares memories of Austin Stephanos, Perry Cohen
Even though it’s been 10 years since the boys’ disappearance, David Mitchell remembers it like it was yesterday, and it still makes him shudder.
He said he had sailed on a motor yacht from Jacksonville to Jupiter that day. That afternoon brought a powerful storm, the kind that only an ocean can generate. He said it resembled those of the night before.
“It was just lightning strikes and funnel clouds,” said Mitchell, 65, who previously worked for the Jib marina and now does occasional handyman work for the business. “I was steering and got hit by a water spout in the 85-foot boat and it leaned us over. It was really bad.”
When alerts about the missing boys started blaring on his phone, Mitchell was shocked to see the names of two boys he knew for years as regulars at the marina. He said he saw them at least twice a month in the last few years of their lives.
Mitchell spent the rest of the day tirelessly searching for them, like so many other people who knew them. To this day, he wonders whether they were really trying to reach the Bahamas because he knew them as responsible kids who knew about boating and how difficult that trip would have been.
Like the rest of northern Palm Beach County, he is left to miss them and wonder.
“I couldn’t believe it was those two kids,” Mitchell said. “They were very seaworthy guys. They have been on boats for most of their life. They loved fishing. That was their whole life, and they weren’t mischievous or anything. They were always really good little kids.”
Maya Washburn covers northern Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida-Network. Reach her at mwashburn@pbpost.com. Support local journalism: Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Austin and Perry: 10 years ago, two Jupiter-area teens went missing. Their memory prevails
Reporting by Maya Washburn, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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