One Saturday morning in November 2020, Dimitris Choulis, a human rights lawyer native to the Greek island of Samos, woke to a message informing him that twenty-four asylum seekers had landed on the beach.

Worried they would be forced back to Turkey by the Greek authorities, Dimitris rushed to the mountains overlooking the shore. There were no asylum seekers — most likely, they had immediately left the area for fear of arrest. Meanwhile, the Greek authorities had appeared, and so Dimitris ran to the port, thinking the new arrivals might be sent back across the Aegean to Turkey.

Eventually, the asylum seekers turned up, and Dimitris began to reconstruct the events: their boat had reached Samos at midnight, at which point one of the passengers, a six-year-old Afghan boy, had gone missing at sea. At roughly 1:30 AM, a search and rescue team arrived — and left immediately without conducting a rescue mission.