Boater Brian Hooker appeared “exhausted” and desperate for water when he first came to shore after losing his wife — and insisted he’d desperately tried to raise the alarm with flares, according to a key witness.
Hooker stumbled into Marsh Harbour Boatyards in the Bahamas at around 4 a.m. on April 5 — roughly nine hours after he claims his 55-year-old still-missing wife, Lynette, fell off a dinghy in rough waters, a security guard who first saw him told Fox News Digital.
But days before he was arrested as a suspect, Hooker did not initially seem suspicious, even as he ranted about a key and a woman, according to the security guard, Edward Smith.
“He was more exhausted than anything else. He was asking for water. He wanted water to drink,” Smith recalled of the strange encounter.
He then told the security officer what he alleges happened to his wife — whom relatives and neighbors have since said he had an alarmingly violent relationship with.
“He said he was on a cay, like at a bar, having something to eat or drink, and they came out to go to another place or back to their boat, but somehow they got out in the rough weather, and they had that incident, the lady [went] overboard,” Smith recalled.
The witness was immediately curious why it had taken Hooker so long to raise the alarm, to which he claimed he had tried without success.
“He said he sent up two flares. The first flare he sent up, there was a boat that passed and they didn’t respond to it. He said another boat passed, he sent up another flare, and they didn’t respond to it,” Smith said of Hooker’s apparent attempts to get help, which appear to have no witnesses.
“I asked him, ‘So, where is the lady?’ He says, ‘She’s in the water,'” he recalled.
“So I say, ‘From seven (p.m.)? And you’re just reaching [the shore] now?'” Smith recalled of the nine-hoiur gap between the alleged accident and Hooker finally raising the alarm.
“He said the wind was blowing so strong, so when that happened, the boat blew away from him and he couldn’t really see in the dark,” Smith said.
He told the witness he “drifted from that time until the time he hit here,” smith recalled.
The guard called the police, who arrived at around 5 a.m. on April 5, and said Hooker was still talking to them when Smith’s shift ended at 7 a.m.
Detectives returned on Saturday to the boatyard, a second employee told Fox News Digital.
The hubby was later arrested and police have until 7:20 p.m. EMT Monday to decide whether to charge or release him in connection with his wife’s disappearance.
Although a flotation device has been found, there are still no signs of Lynette’s body.
Hooker has strenuously denied any involvement in his wife’s disappearance, insisting in his only post about it before he was arrested that he was “heartbroken over the recent boat accident in unpredictable seas and high winds that caused my beloved Lynette to fall from our small dinghy.”
