Girl Killed in Cruise Ship Fall to Get Police Escort Home

(INDIANAPOLIS) — An attorney for the family of an 18-month-old girl who fell to her death from a cruise ship in Puerto Rico says a hearse and police escort will meet them at a Chicago airport and take them home to Indiana.

This May 11, 2006 file photo shows the Freedom of the Seas cruise ship docked in Bayonne, N.J. Police in Puerto Rico says that on Sunday, July 7, 2019, a toddler apparently slipped from her grandfather’s hands and fell to her death on this cruise ship, Freedom of the Seas, while docked in Puerto Rico. (AP Photo/Mike Derer, File)

Attorney Michael Winkleman says Chloe Wiegand’s family flew Thursday morning from the U.S. island territory to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and boarded a flight to Chicago with the toddler’s body. He didn’t say which relatives are flying back.

Winkleman has challenged a Puerto Rico police report that Chloe slipped from her grandfather’s hands Sunday as he held her out of an 11th-story window on the Freedom of the Seas. Winkleman says she plunged from an open window in a children’s play area on the ship.