South Korean officials have opened a criminal investigation into the captain of the South Korean ferry that capsized off the country’s southwest coast.  The death toll is 26 – with 270 people, many of them teens on a high school trip, still unaccounted for.  And now we’re learning that a junior officer was at the helm at the time of the disaster.

An investigating prosecutor said that not only was the captain not at the helm, he may not even have been on the bridge at the time.

“He may have been off the bridge.. and the person at the helm at the time was the third officer,” the investigator said.

“I apologize to the passengers and victims and families,” said 69-year old Lee Joon-seok earlier as he sat in a Coast Guard office, covering his face with a hoody sweater surrounded by a gaggle of reporter leaning in with cameras and microphones.  He declined to answer any questions about how or why he managed to get off the Sewol while hundreds remained onboard.

One survivor told a South Korean television station, “I was one of the first ones to jump on a coastguard boat and there were several others, and I heard from one of the rescuers that the captain was on the boat before me.”  Other survivors related similar accounts.

The weather was getting in the way of the search and rescue.  Until just a few hours ago, it was windy, rainy, and dark at the site where the Sewol went over.

In other developments, prosecutors conducted a raid on the Chonghaejin Marine company, which owns and operates the Sewol.  The emerged with boxes of documents presumedly related to the ferry disaster.