Mom Who Fell Off Cruise Ship Was Sitting on Railing

After days of searching a 4,300-square-mile area of the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard halted its search early Monday for a Texas woman who fell off a cruise ship. The search was unable to find any trace of Samantha Broberg, who was a stay-at-home mother of four children, the Houston Chronicle reports. Her husband, Texas racehorse trainer Karl Broberg, was not on board the Carnival Liberty, where traveling companions reported the 33-year-old Broberg missing on Friday. Surveillance video revealed that she had fallen into the sea from the 10th deck of the ship at around 2am on Friday, hours after the ship left Galveston, Texas, for Mexico.

The cruise line says Broberg appears to have fallen backward into the sea after sitting on a railing. "Based on the video analysis, we can confirm that it appears she climbed up and sat on a deck railing and subsequently fell backwards," a Carnival spokesperson tells ABC News. A spokesman for the Coast Guard, which sent at least three aircraft to search for Broberg, tells the Star-Telegram that her companions didn't realize she was missing until noon on Friday, and the Coast Guard wasn't contacted until 5pm that day, after the cruise line had searched the ship and reviewed its surveillance footage. (More cruise ships stories.)