After a day of deliberations, a federal court jury in Los Angeles found former Capt. Jerry Boylan guilty Monday of gross negligence in the deaths of 34 people in the fiery disaster aboard the Conception dive boat.
The ship caught fire in the early morning hours of Sept. 2, 2019, while it was anchored off Santa Cruz Island, trapping 33 passengers and one crew member in the bunk room.
Prosecutors said Boylan, who had been a captain for 34 years, was negligent in failing to appoint a night watch or drilling his crew in fire safety.
Boylan, who did not testify in his trial, faces up to 10 years in federal prison when U.S. District Judge George Wu sentences him on Feb. 8.
In closing argument to jurors on Friday, Asst. U.S. Atty. Brian Faerstein said Boylan “was the first to abandon the ship, the first to jump in the water.”
Ignoring “basic rules of prudent seamanship” and the Certificate of Inspection requirements hanging in his own wheelhouse, prosecutors said, Boylan failed to order a roving night watch as people slept in a windowless bunk room below deck.
It amounted to “a roll of the dice every night that his passengers went to sleep … in the remote and isolated waters of the Pacific Ocean,” Faerstein said.
Boylan had been a boat captain for 34 years and should have known the danger of fire, prosecutors said, and a roving night watch would have spotted the blaze before it raged out of control.
Boylan also neglected to train his inexperienced crew in fire safety, giving only perfunctory instruction on where equipment was located, prosecutors said, and when he woke up to find the fire spreading on his boat, he was the first to jump into the water.
In her closing argument to jurors Friday, one of Boylan’s attorneys, Georgina Wakefield, said her client was not the coward the government painted him as, and that when he woke up, the encroaching flames were already 15 feet tall, confronting him with “an impossible situation.”
She said Boylan had done things “the Fritzler way” for decades, referring to boat owner Glen Fritzler, who did not require a roving night watch. “Jerry cared. … He could have done better,” Wakefield said. “There absolutely should have been a roving patrol.” But he did not know he was endangering people’s lives, she said. “He didn’t know he should have done anything differently.” The fire was a tragedy but not the fault of a man “making a day wage at 66 years old.”
