Amy Bradley’s family is still searching for answers.
It’s been almost 30 years since Amy disappeared at the age of 23 while on a Royal Caribbean Cruise ship with her loved ones, including parents Iva Bradley and Ron Bradley, as well as brother Ronald “Brad” Bradley.
On March 24,1998, Amy and Brad spent time at a pool party on the cruise—which was headed to Curaçao—before heading to the ship’s disco party. It would become the last night Brad saw his sister.
“We go up there, spend several hours up there, talking to people and meeting people and having fun,” Brad told WWBT’s 12 On Your Side in an interview shared July 11. Upon returning to the room, Amy began to feel seasick and decided to sleep on the room’s balcony. “She said, ‘I’m going to stay out here on the chaise lounge and a lot of fresh air and wind. I don’t want to go in a closed room right now.’”
Brad continued, revealing the last words he ever said to Amy, “So, I told her I loved her.”
Later, upon waking, Brad said the balcony door was open about 18 inches but that Amy “wasn’t there anymore,” vanishing in seemingly plain sight. Despite the family and crew searching the ship, they did not find any sign of the 23-year-old.
Over the years, Brad and his family have remained adamant that Amy is still alive somewhere.
“A shirt she was wearing was laid across one of the chairs in the room, so we know she came back into the room,” Brad said. “There’s a lot of haters online that say a lot of nasty things and basically say she’s gone, she fell over, she jumped over. I can guarantee those two things didn’t happen.”
While Brad told the outlet he’s replayed the night over and over and remains suspicious of some of the people they met while on the ship, nothing has ever come of his suspicions. And in the years since, he said thousands of tips have come in from people claiming to have seen Amy—including one that has led the family to suspect she may have been kidnapped or smuggled off the boat and sex trafficked.
“A Navy man, who visited a brothel on Curaçao, he wasn’t supposed to be there, so he didn’t report it because he didn’t want to get in trouble,” Brad recalled. “A couple of years later, he contacted us and said there was a girl in there who said, ‘My name is Amy Bradley. I need help.’”
But with nothing ever being found, the family is hopeful that Netflix’s new July 16 documentary, Amy Bradley Is Missing, may help lead to more information.
“We’re gearing up for, hopefully,” Brad said, “what will be an avalanche of phone calls and emails from, who knows where, all over the world, trying to help us find her.”
Because despite the decades separating them from their daughter and sister, Brad and his parents are holding onto hope.
“My parents and I share this gut feeling that she is still alive, however unrealistic that may be to a lot of people. We’re never going to give up,” he added. “If you don’t take opportunities and follow leads, you know you’ve given up on her, and we’re not going to do that.”
Unfortunately, Amy’s disappearance isn’t the only tragedy to occur on a boat. Read on for more.
Lake Tahoe Boat Capsizing
In June 2025, a boat crash in Lake Tahoe took the lives of eight individuals, making it the deadliest sea tragedy in California since 2019. The victims included Doordash executive Josh Pickles, as well as his parents Terry Pickles and Paula Bozinovic, and his uncle Peter Bayes, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office Coroner’s Division confirmed to ABC 7 San Francisco at the time.
The family had been celebrating the 71st birthday of Pickles’ mother, a rep for the family told the outlet. Timothy O’Leary, James Guck, Theresa Giullari, and Stephen Lindsay were also killed in the crash. There were only two survivors.
Red Sea Tourist Disaster
A tourist submarine carrying 45 people crashed off in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt in March 2025, killing six Russian tourists, the Egyptian governorate office confirmed to NBC News at the time. Of the 39 people who survived, local officials told the Associated Press that nine were injured, while the remaining 30 were returned to their hotels.
The vessel that crashed was owned by Sinbad Submarines, a tourist agency that offers recreational tours 25 meters below the sea surface for $70 per person. In a statement to Daily News Egypt following the crash, the company said of the six victims, “We sadly join the deceased families in mourning them with profound grief.”
Faster Pussycat Member Taime Downe’s Fiancée’s Fatal Cruise Ship Fall
Kimberly Burch, the fiancée of Faster Pussycatmember Taime Downe, fell from a Royal Carribean ‘80s-themed cruise ship off the coast of Miami in March 2025, her mother Carnell Burch confirmed to TMZ at the time.
In an interview two months later, Downe alleged that his fiancée’s death was “alcohol and prescription related.”
“It’s a rollercoaster,” Downe told SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk in May 2025 of his grieving process. “I’m hanging in there. I’m just taking it a day at a time.”
Sicily Superyacht Sinking
Amid a freak storm in August 2024, a superyacht off the coast of Sicily containing 10 crew members as well as 12 passengers sank. The six victims of the catastrophe included tech CEO Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, New York-based attorney Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, as well as Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy.
Officials later determined that the accident was caused by a “waterspout,” or a tornado that can occur at sea. Salvo Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, told NBC News at the time of the crash that the boat was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
One of the lone survivors of the tragedy Charlotte Golunski—whose young daughter and partner also survived—described the storm to La Repubblica as feeling like “the end of the world.”
Titan Submersible Implosion
In June 2023, the disappearance of OceanGate’s Titan submersible, a deep-sea vessel designed to take tourists to the crash site of the Titanic, dominated the news cycle. After a four-day search—during which a tally was kept of the sub’s 96-hour oxygen supply—it was determined that the seacraft had imploded on itself, killing all five of the passengers.
The perished vessel carried OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British businessman Hamish Harding, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood as well as Titanic researcher Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Less than a month after the implosion, OceanGate completely shut down its operations. In Implosion: Titanic Sub Disaster, a documentary released nearly two years after the tragedy, events that led to the crash, including a lack of attention to safety protocols by OceanGate, were examined. Additionally, footage from what the Coast Guard believes was the moment of the implosion was released.
In the clip, Rush’s wife Wendy Rush—a director for the submersible tourism company—who was monitoring the voyage from the OceanGate offices, noticed a loud crash as the submersible was set to hit 3,300 meters below sea level. Addressing her colleague Gary Foss, she said, “What was that bang?”
Naya Rivera’s Drowning
While on a boat trip on California’s Lake Piru with her young son Josey, the Glee star disappeared, launching a lengthy investigation after authorities found her son alone on the boat in the middle of the lake July 8, 2020.
After five days of searching Ventura County Sheriff’s department confirmed that Rivera’s body was found in the lake, floating at its surface. Rivera’s son—whom Rivera shared with ex Ryan Dorsey—shared amid the investigation that the pair had gone swimming in the lake that day and he remembered being helped back into the boat by his mom.
“There are a lot of currents on the lake that appear particularly in the afternoon,” Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub confirmed at a 2020 press conference. “We believe it was mid-afternoon when she disappeared, the idea perhaps being that the boat started drifting, it was unanchored, and that she mustered enough energy to get her son back onto the boat, but not enough to save herself.”
