LOS ANGELES (CN) — A 24-second iPhone video taken by one of 33 passengers who died four years ago on a burning dive boat showed the victims trapped in the smoke-filled, below-deck bunk room after the captain had already jumped overboard.
The deeply distressing video was shown Thursday afternoon at the trial of Jerry Boylan, the former captain of the doomed dive boat Conception. Boylan is charged with seaman's manslaughter because, among other accusations, he didn't have a required night watch on the boat and was the first to abandon the burning 75-foot vessel rather than trying to save passengers.
"Oh my god, what is that?" a man is heard yelling in the video, against the noises of smoke alarms and panicked shouts.
The video was found on the phone of Patricia Ann Beitzinger, a 48-year-old Arizona woman who was on the trip with her partner.
Among the people watching the video in the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday were dozens of family members of the victims — some of whom made soft groans while it was played.
U.S. District Judge George Wu, a George W. Bush appointee, had asked the family members on Wednesday to step outside the courtroom if they thought that they would be overwhelmed by their emotions. The judge made the request after other photos and videos taken on the three-day Labor Day diving trip off the Central California coast were introduced as evidence, causing some relatives in attendance to weep audibly in front of the jury.
The video played in court on Thursday was taken at 3:17 a.m. on September 2, 2019. Boylan had jumped ship at 3:14, moments after he had radioed the Coast Guard from the boat's upper deck.
In her opening statement Wednesday, an attorney for the 70-year-old Boylan pinned blame for the tragedy on the owner of the Conception, who the attorney said had trained Boylan when he started out as a deckhand and who never used a night watch or roving patrol on any of his fleet of three commercial dive boats.
The Conception, a three-deck plywood and fiberglass vessel used for overnight diving trips around the Channel Islands across from Santa Barbara, was at anchor near one of the islands in the early morning of September 2, 2019. The boat was on the last stop of the three-day dive trip, and all passengers and one crew member were asleep in the bunk room below deck, when a fire broke out on the main deck at around 3 a.m.
Boylan and four crew members were sleeping in their quarters on the upper deck when the fire started. According to a 2020 National Transportation Safety Board report of the disaster, the second galley hand was awakened by a sound below. When he looked out, he noticed the fire on the main deck and woke the other crew members sleeping above.
However, the stair from the upper deck to the main deck was already blocked by flames, and the crew had to climb or jump down to the main deck — with one of them breaking his leg in the process.
There, they found that the entrance to the salon, where both the regular staircase to the bunk room its escape hatch were located, was already engulfed in flames and was impossible to enter.
Citing a confidential report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Los Angeles Times reported in September that the fire started in a large plastic trash can on the boat's main deck, underneath the stairs to the upper deck and just outside the doors to the salon.
One of the first witnesses called by the prosecution had been on the Conception in late August, just before the boat's final trip days later. Jackie Palmer told the jury that she had joined on a three-day arts trip around the Channel Island to do watercolor paintings and fondly recalled members of the crew who were also on the fatal journey.
"They were totally awesome," Palmer said.
Although the second captain on the boat had conducted a safety briefing for the passengers and pointed out where the escape hatch from the bunk room exited in the salon on the main deck, Palmer said they were never shown where the escape hatch was located in the below-deck bunk room.
Among the allegations against Boylan by federal prosecutors is that he didn't train or drill his crew on how to use firefighting equipment aboard the Conception. The boat had two fire stations with hoses that could be used to spray seawater from pumps in the engine room, but the second galley hand who had first noticed the fire and lowered himself to the main deck ran straight past one of the fire stations because he had no idea what it was or how to use it, prosecutors say.
The first crew member to testify Thursday was the boat's first deckhand, Milton French.
French told the jury that he knew how to use the hoses in the fire stations but that he had never done so. According to French, he had been told how to use the fire extinguishers on board and what to do when there was a fire in the engine room. Still, he said: "I don't remember any designated fire training days or exercises."
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