Dive boat fire captain sentenced to four year prison term

Shutterstock

Jerry Nehl Boylan, 70, the captain of the Conception, the Santa Barbara-based dive boat involved in the deadly 2019 fire that cost 34 lives, was yesterday sentenced to 48 months in federal prison.

The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu. A restitution hearing was scheduled for July 11.

In November last year, as we reported at the time, at the conclusion of a 10-day trial, a jury found Boylan guilty of one count of misconduct or neglect of ship officer – an offense commonly called “seaman’s manslaughter.”

Reporting on the sentencing, the Department of Justice notes that the Conception was a 75-foot, wood-and-fiberglass passenger vessel that docked in Santa Barbara Harbor. During a Labor Day weekend dive trip in 2019, the boat carried 33 passengers and six crew members, including Boylan.

During the early morning hours of September 2, 2019, a fire broke out while the boat was anchored in Platt’s Harbor near Santa Cruz Island. The fire, which engulfed the boat and led to its sinking, resulted in the deaths of 34 people who had been sleeping below deck. Five crew members, including Boylan, were able to escape and survived.

“The defendant’s cowardice and repeated failures caused the horrific deaths of 34 people,” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada. “The victims’ families will be forever devastated by this needless tragedy. While today’s sentence cannot fully heal their wounds, we hope that our efforts to hold this defendant criminally accountable brings some measure of healing to the families.”

“The fate of the victims on the Conception might have been different were it not for the negligence of the defendant,” said Mehtab Syed, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “I want to commend the collaborative effort by investigators and prosecutors that led to today’s sentence and hope that it delivers a measure of justice to the victims’ families as they continue to heal from this tragedy.”

Boylan, as captain of the Conception, committed a series of failures – including abandoning his ship instead of rescuing passengers – that resulted in the disaster. Such conduct constituted misconduct, gross negligence, and inattention to his duties and led to the deaths of 34 victims, prosecutors argued.

As the ship’s captain, Boylan was responsible for the safety and security of the vessel, its passengers, and its crew. Federal prosecutors argued he failed in his responsibilities in several ways, including by:

• failing to have a night watch or roving patrol;
• failing to conduct sufficient fire drills and crew training;
• failing to provide firefighting instructions or directions to crew members after the fire started;
• failing to use firefighting equipment, including a fire ax and fire extinguisher that were next to him in the wheelhouse, to fight the fire or attempt to rescue trapped passengers;
• failing to perform any lifesaving or firefighting activities whatsoever at the time of the fire, even though he was uninjured;
• failing to use the boat’s public address system to warn passengers and crew members about the fire; and
• becoming the first crew member to abandon ship even though 33 passengers and one crew member were still alive and trapped below deck in the vessel’s bunkroom and in need of assistance to escape.

In its report on the incident, the National Transportation Safety made multiple recommendations for the improvement of small passenger vessel safety — notably the need for them to be required to have a safety management system (SMS).