Jury convicts captain of manslaughter in 2019 Conception dive boat fire that killed 34 people
The jury deliberated about eight hours on Monday before finding Jerry Nehl Boylan guilty of misconduct and gross negligence by a ship officer for the 34 deaths.
A Los Angeles federal jury on Monday convicted a longtime boat captain of manslaughter in the deaths of 34 people who a prosecutor said “could have been saved” from a fire that broke out when they were sleeping in a cramped bunk room during a Labor Day weekend scuba-diving trip four years ago.
Jerry Nehl Boylan, 70, faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing, which is scheduled for Feb. 8. He was allowed to stay out of custody until then.
The verdict was read about 4:30 p.m. The jury of seven men and five women began deliberating about 8:30 a.m. Family members of some of the victims celebrated in the hallway outside the courtroom after the verdict, crying and hugging each other. A mass gasp of relief could be heard from the families when U.S. District Judge George Wu’s clerk read the verdict.
“It’s important for the world to know this was not an accident,” Vicki Moore told reporters outside the courthouse. Moore’s daughter, Kendra Chan, and husband, Scott Chan, died on the boat.
Kathleen and Clark McIlvain, whose son Charles died on the boat, said they were relieved to hear Boylan declared guilty.
“I’m not sure Jerry Boylan knows it yet, but he heard it 12 times when the jury was polled, and it’s got to sink in sometime,” Clark McIlvain said. (Kathleen told me in an email last week, “Charlie was an amazing, talented, compassionate and loud man who I am sure is railing at the injustice of his unnecessary and preventable death.”)
Families applauded when prosecutors exited the courthouse for a press conference led by U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles Martin Estrada, who said Boylan’s failed to adhere the well-established protocol “that the buck stops with the captain.” A U.S. Attorney’s Office press release cited Boylan’s “unpardonable cowardice.”
Boylan left the courtroom with his lawyers looking vacant and depressed, which matched his demeanor through the nine-day trial. He cried at some points in trial, including during closing arguments on Friday.
Prosecutors’ case hinged on Boylan’s failure to train his crew, his failure to require a roving night patrol and his failure to instruct his crew to fight the fire. To find him guilty, jurors needed to agree that he acted with misconduct and/or gross negligence, which is a stricter standard than mere negligence. Jurors asked three questions on Monday before announcing a verdict, including if Boylan’s failures related to only the day of the fire or more broadly. Wu referred them to specific regulations that had been entered as evidence.
As a longtime captain, Boylan knew his five-person crew wasn’t seaworthy, and his failure to train them meant he knowingly endangered his passengers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian R. Faerstein said in his closing argument on Friday.
The Conception “was a safe boat, but the way the defendant operated it is what made it unsafe — what made it a risk to human life,” Faerstein said. Boylan “had been a licensed captain for longer than most of his crew had been alive,” Faerstein said, but he ignored mandatory training requirements and shirked his responsibility to ensure everyone’s safety.
Boylan’s failure to train “amounted to a roll of the dice every night his passengers went to sleep aboard the Conception,” Faerstein said. Then, when fire broke out, Boylan abandoned his crew “who had all jumped down to the main deck and are trying to figure out what to do.”
A cellphone video from the bunk room during the fire was the last thing jurors saw on Friday during rebuttal by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark A. Williams. It was recorded on victim Patricia Ann Beitzinger’s phone at 3:17 a.m. on Sept. 2, 2019, — three minutes after Boylan’s mayday call to the U.S. Coast Guard. It shows panicked passengers become increasingly desperate as they try to fight the fire and find a way to escape. According to the transcript finalized by Judge Wu, one says, “We’re gonna die.” Another says there must be “more extinguishers.”
“They were not a lost cause. They could have been saved,” Faerstein said.
A torched fire extinguisher found in the bunk room was evidence in trial, and Williams displayed it for jurors in his rebuttal. Boylan had a fire extinguisher near him, but he didn’t use it. Instead, Williams told the jury, “this was the only fire extinguisher used to fight that fire.”
“And it was used by someone in the bunk room,” Williams said.
Boylan’s lawyers said in trial that Boylan and his crew did all they could to try to save people, but the fire grew too fast.
“This case is not about whether Jerry could have done he could have done better. We know that now. He knows that now,” Deputy Federal Defender Georgina Wakefield said in her closing argument on Friday. She reminded jurors that other people who captained Truth Aquatics boats testified to never implementing night patrols, either.
“It’s not manslaughter to do things the way every captain on a Truth Aquatics boat did,” Wakefield said, referring to the company that owned the Conception. “It’s not manslaughter to stay on a burning boat to get on the radio and to hope there's someone nearby listening.”
She also reminded jurors of who she believes is responsible for the Conception’s safety failures: Glenn Fritzler, the owner of Truth Aquatics.
Boylan “did not know that doing things the Fritzler way” could cause “the deaths of 34 souls,” Wakefield said.
“He cared about those people,” said Wakefield, who defended Boylan with Deputy Federal Defenders Julia Deixler, Gabriela Rivera and Joshua D. Weiss.
(Wakefield’s use of “souls” referenced what boat owner Bob Hansen testified Boylan told him when he got aboard Hansen’s Grape Escape boat as the Conception burned. Prosecutors objected to Hansen’s statement as hearsay, but Judge Wu overruled. It was one of the only statements from Boylan that was allowed in. His lawyers tried to persuade Wu to allow a U.S. Coast Guard representative to testify about Boylan’s answers in an interview, arguing the statements qualified as excited utterances and were thus an exception to hearsay, but Judge Wu ended up not allowing it. Boylan never took the stand.)
Boylan’s case is one of the first prosecutions in the United States under the seaman’s manslaughter statute. The original indictment charged Boylan with 34 counts, one for each death, but Judge Wu dismissed it and prosecutors secured a new indictment for a single count. Faerstein told jurors on Friday that they could convict Boylan if they believe he’s responsible for just one death, though prosecutors argued he’s responsible all.
The trirought a rare amount of grief to the federal courthouse, where family members of the victims regularly attended the trial. Therapy dogs were in the hallway each of trial to comfort them. Judge Wu admonished the gallery several times to refrain from audible reactions after Boylan’s attorneys complained.
Testimony last week from a dive recovery technician revealed new information about exactly where people’s bodies were located. Charles McIlvaine’s wife wrote on Instagram that he was found under an air vent with two women who were holding each other so tight their bodies had to be pried apart.
“The coroner knew this & still announced to the press that people passed away in their sleep,” she wrote.
Estrada met with the victims’ families privately after the prosecution rested, and he attended closing arguments with Assistant U.S. Attorney Mack Jenkins, who is chief of the Central District’s Criminal Division.
After the press conference Monday evening, some of the victims’ family members visited with Faerstein, Williams and the other trial prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew W. O’Brien and Juan M. Rodriguez, outside the courthouse. Estrada and Jenkins were there, too, as was Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph McNally, the deputy chief of the Criminal Division.
“All these families got really close. We’ve seen a lot of each other over the years,” said Robert Kutz, whose daughter, Allie Kurtz, died in the fire.
“We’ve all supported each other and loved on each other and been there for each other,” Allie’s mother, Cherie McDonough, told me. “If somebody didn’t understand something, somebody else understood something and would tell you. We’ve been so fortunate to have these people in our lives. They’re really special to us now.”
Kurtz was 26 and a new Conception crew member when she died. She was sleeping in the bunk room with the 33 other victims when the fire broke out.
The surviving crew members testified in trial, including Ryan Sims, who said he asked Boylan for safety training the day before the fire. Sims testified that Boylan told him, “When we get to it, Ryan.”
“And then, Ryan Sims testified, the defendant chuckled,” Faerstein said during his closing. “That’s how he felt about fire safety.”
Faerstein showed jurors a photo from an orientation Boylan conducted with passengers. “They were entrusting him with their lives, and he knew his crew was not prepared,” Faerstein said.
Faerstein then showed a photo from a birthday celebration the night before the fire. Crew member Michael Kohls had baked two cakes: One for Tia Salika-Adamic who was celebrating her 17th birthday, and another for Michael Quitasol, who was to turn 62 in a couple days. Salika-Adamic was on the boat with her father and mother, Steve Salika and Diane Salika-Adamic, and her best friend, Berenice Felipe, who was the youngest victim at 16.
Quitasol was on the boat with his wife, Fernisa Sison, and his three daughters, Evan Michel Solano Quitasol, Angela Rose Solano Quitasol and Nicole Storm Solano Quitasol. Their mother, Susana Rosas, attended the trial and displayed photos of them outside the courthouse after the verdict.
According to testimony, Kohls awoke at 1:30 a.m. on Sept. 2, 2019, and cleaned the galley for an hour. He returned to bed about 2:30 a.m., according to testimony, then awoke to a a fire at 3:14 a.m. He yelled “fire! fire!” then saw Boylan roll out of his bed.
“After this, chaos ensued. Panic. No planning,” Faerstein said in his closing. “Exactly what one would expect from a crew that had not been trained.”
Within a minute, Boylan made a mayday call to the U.S. Coast Guard, then jumped overboard. His crew had jumped down to a lower deck, but instead of giving them firefighting directions, Boylan told them to jump overboard, too. The boat’s public announcement system was next to the Coast Guard radio, but Boylan never warned the 34 people sleeping in the bunk room that a fire was burning upstairs.
Faerstein reminded the jury of testimony from Sean Tortora, who teaches marine firefighting courses at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York: A captain’s Coast Guard mayday call is “tantamount to giving up” and shouldn’t be the first thing done after discovering a fire.
Faerstein also reminded jurors that, before jumping overboard, Kohls twice ran by the fire station, but “he didn’t know it was there” and never attempted to use the hose to soak the top of the bunk room’s escape hatch.
“He literally had an ocean of water at his disposal,” Faerstein said.
Faerstein said the crew was “working on lost time” because Boylan didn’t require a roving night patrol, which could have been done in shifts of only a couple hours per crew person. The Coast Guard requires boats such as the Conception to have roving patrols every night. The Conception passed an inspection a few months before the fire, but a Coast Guard representative testified that the boat wouldn’t have received its certificate had the Coast Guard known Boylan wasn’t doing roving patrols.
“Had there been a roving patrol up at night with even a small amount of fire training, it would have caught that fire,” Williams said. Investigators believe the fire started in a trash can.
“That’s what the evidence established: This fire started small. It took minutes and minutes and minutes to develop, but nobody was awake to catch it. And that’s because the defendant didn’t comply with the law,” Williams continued.
Williams also dismissed Boylan’s lawyers’ argument that he was following “the Fritzler way.”
“Not a single witness use that phrase during this trial, ‘the Fritzler way.’ It didn’t materialize during trial. The fact that other captains didn’t know basic rules does not mean that this defendant shouldn’t have known those rules,” Williams said.
Here is a list of the 34 victims:
Carol Diana Adamic, 60, of Santa Cruz
Tia Salika-Adamic, 17, of Santa Cruz
Neal Gustav Baltz, 42, of Phoenix, Arizona
Patricia Ann Beitzinger, 48, of Phoenix, Arizona
Vaidehi Campbell, 41, of Felton
Kendra Chan, 26, of Oxnard
Raymond “Scott”Chan, 59, of Los Altos
Andrew Fritz, 40, of Sacramento
Daniel Garcia, 46, of Berkeley
Justin Carroll Dignam, 58, of Anaheim
Marybeth Guiney, 51, of Santa Monica
Yulia Krashennaya, 40, of Berkeley
Alexandra Kurtz, 26, of Santa Barbara
Charles McIlvain, 44, of Santa Monica
Caroline McLaughlin, 35, of Oakland
Angela Rose Quitasol, 28, of Stockton
Evan Michel Quitasol, 37, of Stockton
Nicole Storm Quitasol, 31, of Imperial Beach
Michael Quitasol, 62, of Stockton
Steven Salika, 55, of Santa Cruz
Ted Strom, 62, of Germantown, Tennessee
Wei Tan, 26, of Goleta
Adrian Dahood-Fritz, 40, of Sacramento
Lisa Fiedler, 52, of Mill Valley
Kristina “Kristy” Finstad, 41, of Santa Cruz
Fernisa Sison, 57, of Stockton
Kristian Takvam, 34, of San Francisco.
Juha Pekka Ahopelto, 50, of Sunnyvale
Berenice Felipe, 16, of Santa Cruz
Xiang Lin, 45, of Fremont
Sanjeeri DeoPujari (Nirmal), 31, of Stamford, Connecticut
Sumil Sandhu, 45, of Half Moon Bay
Kaustubh Nirmal, 33, of Stamford, Connecticut
Yuko Hatano, 39, of San Jose
Read the complaint in the wrongful death lawsuit here.
Read the National Transportation Safety Board’s report here.
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