Moments before her son left to work on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Obdulia Fuentes Ortiz said goodbye and asked him to work "carefully" due to the risks involved in his profession.
Then, she hung up the phone, not knowing that this would be the last conversation she would have with her son, 35-year-old Alejandro Hernández Fuentes. He's been identified by authorities as one of the six workers who died after the bridge collapsed on Tuesday.
"I have a deep pain in my heart; I don't know how to describe it," Fuentes Ortiz said in an interview with News4.
Hours after the call with her son, she received another call, this time from her daughter-in-law, who alerted her that Hernández had been in an accident.
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"At the moment I didn't imagine it would have been so serious," she said. "(But) when I got there and saw the broken bridge, I felt a strong pain in my heart."
Anguish overtook her body, Fuentes Ortiz said. She spent a day waiting for information from authorities before she learned her greatest fear was true.
"They took us to a room to talk to us, and I was shaking from head to toe. I knew what bad news they were going to give us about my son," Fuentes Ortiz said.
Officials confirmed that Alejandro Hernández Fuentes had died. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Col. Roland Butler Jr. of the Maryland State Police said at a news conference that they had also found the body of another victim, 26-year-old Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River early Tuesday, moments after it was struck by the Dali, a cargo ship. The ship had lost power prior to impact, according to preliminary information from the National Transportation Safety Board.
"I didn't know what to say, what to think. I just wanted to die, too ... of pain," Fuentes Ortiz said, with tears in her eyes.
The men's bodies were found shortly before 10 a.m. Wednesday inside a red pickup truck submerged in 25 feet of water, where the center portion of the bridge fell, Butler said.
Now, Fuentes Ortiz is waiting for officials to finish the autopsy so she can see her son.
"I would like to see him, hug him ... tell him how much I love him," she said.
The four other workers are presumed dead but remain missing. Their bodies and vehicles are believed to be trapped between the steel and concrete of the crumpled bridge. That debris will need to be removed to get to them.
Earlier Thursday, NBC News reported that the employees were on break in their vehicles when the bridge collapsed.
