Adriana Gonzalez, the Mexican wife of a Jefferson County man who died after falling from a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, is asking state officials for help seeing her husband one last time after federal authorities twice denied her entry to the United States to attend his funeral in Poulsbo, planned for Saturday.
Vincent Short, Gonzalez’s 36-year-old husband, who split his time between Port Ludlow, Alaska and Mexico, was working aboard a boat in Akutan, Alaska, when he fell from its mast on July 30 and died shortly afterward, according to Alaska’s Public Safety Department.
The U.S. Coast Guard said it is investigating Short’s death, a representative for the agency confirmed in an email Wednesday, but it could not provide additional information.
Gonzalez hopes to attend the open-casket funeral, then collect her husband's cremated ashes and bring them back to the home they shared in Ensenada, Mexico, with their three children. She and Short's family worry shipping his body to Mexico risks him being lost in transit or decomposing too much to be viewed.
“I just want to say goodbye in person. To see his face, to take his hand and tell him everything is OK,” Gonzalez said Wednesday by phone. “To tell him I’ll be with him forever, that I’ll take care of the kids and be brave like he always told me.”
Short is immortalized in several tattoos Gonzalez got while he was alive.
One reads, “The love of my life … Vincent.”
Another, the couple got about a decade ago, two months into knowing each other: matching robots on their shoulders that appeared to kiss when standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
Gonzalez’s clutches a flower in its hands.
Hope begins to vanish
Gonzalez said she knew something was wrong when Short didn't respond to her good-night message.
After a night of uneasy sleep, Gonzalez awoke to calls from her in-laws, who said they were going to visit her and the kids at their home in Ensenada. Gonzalez kept asking them why, but they said they would explain in person.
Unable to wait, Gonzalez said she made a video call to Short's father in Port Ludlow. He wept as soon as he saw Gonzalez’s face. So Short's stepmother, Vanessa Brower, took the phone and told Gonzalez that Short had died.
The video call continued, even as Gonzalez said she let go of the phone and fell to the ground, sobbing and struggling to breathe.
With the funeral planned for Aug. 22 at a Poulsbo chapel, Gonzalez said she set up a visa appointment with the U.S. Consulate General’s office in Tijuana, Mexico.
She and Short already had an interview set up in September for tourist visas to surprise his family in Washington for Christmas, so she requested to convert the appointment into an emergency visa application interview.
But upon visiting the consulate, she said the interviewer handed her a blue sheet of paper with a list of denial codes, not specifying why she was denied.
After reviewing the paper, Brower and Gonzalez could only find one, 214(b), that seemed to apply: the interviewer didn’t believe there was enough evidence in Gonzalez’s application to prove she would return to Mexico.
With less than two weeks until the funeral, they tried another way. Gonzalez and Brower traveled to San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana on Aug. 14 to request humanitarian parole. But after waiting hours, she said Gonzalez’s request was again denied, with a warning not to try at another crossing.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection could not be immediately reached to explain why Gonzalez’s requests were denied.
As the pair drove back to Ensenada, Gonzalez said she wept, feeling her hopes — so high that morning — vanish.
‘I will do anything to have my goodbye’
It was less than 10 years ago that Gonzalez and Short met.
Gonzalez said she and some friends were having dinner at a restaurant in Ensenada in 2017 before going out dancing when she noticed an especially handsome man sitting nearby with a friend.
The groups struck up conversation. The handsome man, Short, was shy and told Gonzalez he didn’t speak much Spanish.
“I asked him to dance and he told me he had two left feet,” she said. “I told him not to worry — that I would teach him.”
They danced together through the night, then continued talking almost every day afterward — Gonzalez practicing her English, Short his Spanish.
Gonzalez said she learned Short loved his job as a commercial fisherman, which had taken him on a three-month assignment to Ensenada. But as the couple started falling in love, Short shared his only misgiving: if they were to continue, Gonzalez needed to know he had a wife already: “the sea.”
She said she agreed to the terms.
Once it was time for Short’s fishing vessel to leave after his assignment, he bought Gonzalez a promise ring and told her he would return. And after several months, he did.
They married, had kids, and Short would leave for several months each year to work.
In their time alone, she said they joked about the future, like who would push the other person’s wheelchair. And when they were apart, they messaged each other every day, always ending their conversations with “to the moon and back.”
All these years later, this month, as Gonzalez began to wonder if she would ever see her husband again, Brower made one more suggestion — calling news outlets and government officials to plead her case.
“What if we did it the American way? Brower said.
Doubtful at first that anyone would care about her story, Gonzalez looked at her phone’s background, a photo of Short, then nodded.
“I will do anything to have my goodbye with Vincent,” Gonzalez told Brower.
Over the next three days, Brower said she contacted news outlets and the offices of elected officials including Gov. Bob Ferguson, U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Reps. Emily Randall and Michael Baumgartner.
By Thursday morning, Murray’s office and Baumgartner's office told Brower they had petitioned to waive the denial of Gonzalez’s visa application, Brower said. They had received no additional updates by Thursday afternoon.
“I want him to know I did not leave him alone,” Gonzalez said. “That I did everything possible to be with him, because the distance never separated us, or the border. I just want to say goodbye.”
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