Two tragic Keys boat crashes, two vastly different charges. FWC denies special treatment

Both boats were packed with passengers. Both struck fixed channel markers at high speed. Both collisions left one person dead and others injured. And both were investigated by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers.

Two shattering boat crashes, more than a year and 100 miles apart in South Florida, share compelling similarities. But the resulting investigations produced dramatically different criminal charges.

A Key West boat mechanic named Daniel Ross, at the wheel in a nighttime collision in October that killed a 46-year-old woman, now faces a homicide charge that could put him behind bars for 15 years. In the other case, a horrific 2022 crash near the exclusive Ocean Reef Club that left one teenage girl dead and another severely injured, prominent Miami real estate broker George Pino has pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanors. The maximum penalty, if convicted, is 60 days.

The felony charge filed earlier this month against Ross has raised new questions about the FWC’s handling of Pino’s case and marine crash investigations, including the diligence of officers when it comes to pursuing the potentially critical contributing factor of alcohol.

Neither man was tested on the scene for impairment, testing that could support, or rule out, additional DUI charges. Ross later provided blood in a hospital but, according to a law enforcement source, the test was botched. Pino simply declined breath and blood tests after his boat sideswiped a marker in deep south Biscayne Bay not far from Ocean Reef, killing Luciana “Lucy” Fernandez, 17, and injuring 10 others, including now-19-year-old Katerina Puig, who remains permanently disabled.

READ MORE: A 17-year-old Miami girl dies after Florida Keys boat crash; 10 others hurt

Fernandez’s parents, Andres and Melissa Fernandez, released a statement to the Miami Herald saying the Key West felony charge has only added to their anger over what they consider soft law enforcement treatment of Pino, a wealthy and well-connected businessman. Even without DUI tests, the FWC and Monroe County prosecutors agreed to charge Ross with a crime that comes with the possibility of significant prison time.

“Learning about this case …, once again, calls into question the investigation conducted by the FWC, as well as the conclusions reached by [Miami-Dade County State Attorney] Katherine Fernandez-Rundle’s office with respect to the senseless boating accident which claimed the life of our teenage daughter, Lucy.”

Ira Leesfield, a Miami attorney specializing in civil maritime law, said he found it unusual for Pino not to be pushed by investigators to submit a blood sample following such a serious crash. But he said it’s not uncommon for individual officers to make differing judgment calls in the chaos of marine crash scenes — decisions that can wind up making or breaking criminal cases.

“You’re just going to find inconsistencies on the law enforcement side, I’m sorry to tell you,” Leesfield said. “I think the words random, or arbitrary, or inconsistent may apply to some of this, I’m sorry to tell you that.”

Leadership at FWC, which is charged with investigating the vast majority of boat crashes around the state, has repeatedly denied any preferential treatment for Pino and defended its officers and the investigation, insisting that the law limits the ability of officers to demand DUI tests.

Rob Klepper, an FWC spokesperson, also pushed back at trying to read anything into the contrasting severity of charges in the two cases.

“Every single vessel accident is unique and can’t be compared one to one,’’ he said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “You can’t compare boat crashes.”

A tale of two crashes

Boat crashes are everyday events in Florida. With some 1 million registered vessels, the state typically leads the nation in both accidents and deaths — 723 and 63 respectively in 2002, according to the latest FWC annual accident report. Monroe County, which covers the FlorIda Keys, and Miami-Dade usually top the Florida list.

Striking a fixed object like a channel marker in the open water is also surprisingly common, the second-most frequent accident cause in both Miami-Dade and Monroe, according to FWC data, right behind collisions with other boats.

But there were some key differences in the two fatal South Florida crashes, one of them literally night and day.

According to a final FWC report released this month, Ross, 53, and a crew of six were returning in the dark from a memorial service at a sandbar aboard his 22-foot Ranger. One passenger, 46-year-old Misty Wildmon, was sitting on the left gunwale, the edge of the fishing boat’s hull, as it cruised through Safe Harbor Channel at around 25 to 30 mph.

At 8:20 p.m, on an October Friday, the boat hit Daybeacon 5 – the only one of the four markers along the channel without a light. The steel post struck Wildmon “with extreme force,” FWC investigator Glen Way wrote in a Feb. 2 affidavit. She fell backwards, hitting the cover of the Evinrude engine, then dropped into the dark waters.

As Ross stopped the boat, passengers tended to Wildmon’s mother, who suffered minor injuries. Almost a minute went by, according to the FWC report, before anyone realized Wildmon had been ejected. After a search that took about four minutes, they found Wildmon floating face down. They brought her on board, began CPR and called 911, Way wrote.

Ross reached Robbie’s Marina on Stock Island within minutes and paramedics took Wildmon to the Lower Keys Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 9:37 p.m.

The crash got little public attention, unlike the one more than a year earlier near Ocean Reef.

It was Labor Day weekend 2002 and Pino, 53, and his wife Cecilia had spent Sunday at Elliott Key celebrating the 18th birthday of their daughter. also named Cecilia, with a dozen of her friends from Our Lady of Lourdes Academy in Southwest Miami-Dade and Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Coconut Grove.

The sun was still out as Pino headed back south toward a family place in Ocean Reef, steering his 29-foot Robalo center console down a channel through shallow grass flats known as Cutter Bank. At about 6:30 p.m. the boat struck the very last marker in the channel, No. 15. The FWC later determined the boat was moving at about 50 mph and the violent impact shredded the hull and flipped the vessel.

The rescue response was immediate, starting with nearby private boaters and drawing in a variety of law enforcement agencies. Eleven injured passengers were pulled from the water, four airlifted to the hospital. Fernandez, 17, a senior at Lourdes, died the next day. Puig, a popular star soccer player at Lourdes, survived but with severe brain damage.

The alcohol question

In both investigations, FWC officers questioned passengers about drinking aboard the boats.

In the Key West crash, Way, the FWC investigator, wrote that all six passengers had admitted to drinking but his report never made clear if he tested Ross to see if he was intoxicated. A law enforcement source told the Herald that no field sobriety test had been done but Ross did later agree to having blood drawn in a hospital.

That sample, however, would prove problematic because improper equipment was used, the source said. “It’s not legally admissible.”

In the Pino case, officers also didn’t conduct a field sobriety test at the crash scene or hours later on Elliott Key where officers interviewed passengers and Pino, all who had just been pulled from the bay after a harrowing wreck. The agency said it had no probable cause to do so because the businessman, though shaken, did not seem impaired.

But body camera footage later released by the FWC captures an officer repeatedly asking Pino if wants to submit blood – while also stressing that it was not something he had to do. At one point, Pino denies the request, “No. I had two beers.”

The role of alcohol became a much bigger question the next day when officers hauled the capsized boat back to shore. They found 61 empty alcohol bottles and cans stashed on the boat, along with a half-empty booze bottle and a spent bottle of champagne. By that time, it was too late for testing.

READ MORE: 61 booze containers on crashed boat in Keys — and parents outraged over minor charges

In their now-settled March 17 lawsuit, Rudolfo and Kathya Puig, the parents of Katerina, later accused the Pinos of supplying the teens with alcohol that day, an accusation, through their attorneys, the couple denied. Terms of the confidential settlement have not been released.

In the FWC’s final August 2023 report — the document Miami-Dade prosecutors would use to determine formal charges — investigator William Thompson wrote “alcohol was not considered to be a contributing factor to this accident.” He also wrote that Pino cited the lack of his attorney being present for not agreeing to submit a blood sample to test for alcohol after the crash, a statement not captured on any body cam footage.

FWC defends Pino investigation

The agency has repeatedly defended its investigation. Rodney Barreto, a Miami businessman who chairs the FWC commissioner, wrote in an email to the Herald last year that officers pursued all legal options to collect evidence.

He said the investigator in charge that day was “a certified drug recognition expert and stated in the report that he saw no signs of impairment and neither did any of the other officers at the scene.”

“The law does not enable our officers to compel a blood draw or breath test without probable cause,’ he said. ”No one admitted in interviews to consuming alcohol.”

But body cam footage did catch Pino admitting to “two beers” and another passenger told investigators she saw Pino have one alcoholic beverage, according to the FWC’s report. It also remains unclear if FWC officers or their commanders ever discussed seeking a search warrant to force blood sampling. That option is routinely pursued in fatal car accidents by land-based law enforcement agencies, which often have judges on-call to quickly issue such orders — if agencies successfully argue they have probable cause to do so.

READ MORE: Police say alcohol played no role in fatal boat crash, but bodycam video raises questions

Jorge Silva, a Miami personal injury attorney who has represented victims in several high-profile boat accident cases, said it was unusual for police not to draw a blood sample to test for alcohol in any boat accident that results in death or serious injury.

He said he could not comment on the specifics of each case, saying he’s not “intimately familiar” with them and echoing FWC spokesman Klepper that “every case needs to be analyzed on a very fact specific basis.”

“However, I can tell you that when serious injuries occur or a fatality, blood alcohol levels should always be secured,” Silva told the Herald.

FWC accident data from 2022, the latest available, shows investigations rarely find alcohol use as a primary factor in marine accidents. In Monroe, two of 92 reported accidents were blamed on alcohol. Operator inexperience was the top cause at 16. In 90 accidents in Miami-Dade that year, the FWC found alcohol the primary cause in none of them.

Statewide, the agency did find alcohol use to blame in seven of 63 fatal crashes that year.

Two crashes, vastly different charges

It took four months for the FWC to wrap up its investigation of Ross, who repairs boat props for a living. The agency came down hard.

Way, the FWC investigator, wrote that Ross had been reckless in a number of ways: he had no lookout with a spotlight to locate the marker, he was going full speed with a crew that had been drinking and the victim had been sitting in an unsafe area. The FWC also said Ross, who told investigators he was an experienced mariner who had navigated Safe Harbor Channel many times, was also “complacent” and did not rely enough on his GPS to guide him.

All those errors led to Wildmon’s death, concluded Way, who recommended to the Monroe State Attorney’s Office that Ross be charged with felony vessel homicide and reckless boating. The former carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years if convicted. The latter is a first-degree misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail.

Ross, who had not been arraigned as of Friday, was released from Monroe County jail after posting a $100,000 bond. When reached by phone last week, he declined to comment, saying he had not spoken with his attorney. He declined to give his attorney’s name, and an attorney is not listed in court records.

The FWC investigation into Pino — president of Doral-based State Street Reality and fixture of Miami’s business and social scene over nearly three decades — took nearly a year. Miami-Dade State Attorney Fernandez Rundle’s office then announced the charges. Three counts of misdemeanor careless boating. Careless is a lesser charge than reckless and typically applies to an operator who has been inattentive at the wheel.

Based on the conclusions of the FWC report, Rundle’s office said that was the maximum they could charge Pino under Florida law. Some legal experts agreed, telling the The Herald last year that less serious charges aren’t unusual in such cases, given the facts laid out in the FWC report.

Pino’s attorneys Andrew Mescolotto and Howard Srebnick did not return emailed requests for comment on the Key West case. But in August after the FWC final report was released, Pino issued a statement expressing sorrow for the victims

“George and Cecilia Pino are devastated by the passing of Lucy and the serious injuries to Katy and others,” Mescolotto wrote. “The Pinos have already pledged their life savings to compensate and provide medical support for everyone affected by this horrible accident. They continue to pray every day for each person and family that was involved.”

The statement also highlighted the findings that alcohol was not a factor and reiterated a statement Pino told officers — that a larger oncoming boat caused him to lose control of his vessel. FWC investigators, however, stressed in their report that no witnesses, including all who were on Pino’s vessel, saw another boat in the channel in the moments leading up to the crash.

The Fernandezes still believe Pino’s connections and influence helped sway the investigation — and they say the Key West case isn’t the only example. In January, a Miami boater was sentenced to four years in federal court for his role in the deaths of two people in a Bimini boating crash. The investigation did not involve the FWC but the prison time still resonated with them,

In an email to the Herald, they wrote: “We now have no other choice but to conclude that Mr. Pino has been, and continues to be, treated differently.”