LOS ANGELES _ Eleven people were sent to a hospital and potentially five others are unaccounted for after apparently being dumped from a panga boat off the coast of Del Mar on Friday morning, authorities said.
Emergency responders were called to the scene about 4:30 a.m. after people on Sixth Street in Del Mar "heard people yelling for help in the water," said San Diego County Sheriff's Lt. Steve Bodine.
Del Mar Fire Chief Mike Stein told reporters at the scene that 11 people who were rescued from the water are being treated for minor hypothermia.
"We have reports there were about 16 people in a panga coming up from Mexico, so that's the number that we're going off of," he said. "So we've got approximately five that are unaccounted for. We don't know if they made it to shore or not, so we're presuming that they could still be in the water."
The search is ongoing, he said.
Stein said the incident could be "a dump-and-run, where the panga doesn't actually make it to shore, they'll have people swim off the coast and then they head back south."
"We've had a lot of panga boats that have reached our shores here in Southern California, specifically this area of the coast," he said.
