Pino boat crash was ‘not just an accident’ but recklessness, prosecutor says
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The investigation into 2022 boat crash that killed a high school student
On Sept. 4, 2022, a boat operated by real estate broker George Pino crashed in Biscayne Bay, killing 17-year-old Lucy Fernandez.
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Standing before the jury, prosecutor Laura Adams declared George Pino was rushing to make his daughter’s birthday celebration, which led him to crash his boat into a steel channel marker in Biscayne Bay, killing a 17-year-old girl.
“This isn’t blowing a stop sign,” Adams told the jury during closing arguments Monday morning in Pino’s trial. “This is blowing into the stop sign while on the wrong sign of the road when you’ve been drinking.”
Pino, Adams added, decided to speed through the Cutter Bank channel in Biscayne Bay, a busy channel that a maritime expert testified is akin to Interstate 95. Pino was focused on returning to the Ocean Reef Club for his daughter’s birthday dinner — and operated the vessel on the wrong side of the channel and, ultimately, on a collision course with the steel marker, Adams said.
The crash happened around 6 p.m. on Sept. 4, 2022, the Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, a busy time on the waterways. Pino was taking his wife, Cecilia, their daughter Cecilia and 11 of her friends back to Ocean Reef in north Key Largo after an outing on Elliott Key to celebrate his daughter’s upcoming 18th birthday. They were planning to go dinner that night at the club with the girls.
Luciana “Lucy” Fernandez, 17, was killed and Katerina “Katy” Puig, now 21, was left with life-altering physical and neurological disabilities. Both were students at Our Lady of Lourdes Academy.
After closing arguments, the six-person jury, made up of five men and one woman, will determine whether Pino, a 54-year-old Doral real estate broker, should be convicted of manslaughter and vessel homicide stemming from the crash. If convicted, Pino could face up to 15 years in a state prison and a $10,000 fine.
READ MORE: From sobbing outbursts to ‘staredowns,’ key moments of George Pino trial
The crash was not an accident, Adams said, because Pino violated several navigational rules — and piloted the boat in a way that it was almost certain that tragedy would result without thinking about the well-being of his passengers, including his own wife and daughter.
“You can see that this defendant is a man who abdicated all responsibility that a captain of a ship owes all of his passengers,” the prosecutor said.
Adams urged the jury to find Pino guilty, saying the crash only occurred because Pino was reckless and criminally negligent when he was at the helm of the boat.
“No one and nothing is responsible for the death of Lucy Fernandez except for the man sitting right there,” Adams said. “He is the reason that she is gone.”
Pino’s defense attorney, Howard Srebnick, will deliver his closing argument Monday afternoon.
Lies, lies, lies
Looking at the jurors, Adams pointed out how Pino has repeated the claim he had swerved his vessel to the right to avoid the wake of another boat. No witness, including the passengers on Pino’s 29-foot Robalo or in other boats behind him in the channel, saw what Adams has called the “phantom boat.”
The lies, Adams said, were persistent. He lied to police, to his lawyer and to the court system, the prosecutor added.
“He knew this was not just an accident,” Adams “That’s why he lied...”
When lead investigator Lt. William Thompson asked Pino about the crash, he blurted out that claim and included it in a written statement, hoping to blame someone else, Adams said. He and his wife Cecilia Pino repeated the statement under penalty of perjury in a court filing in a civil suit brought by the Puig family.
“He lied, over and over and over again, about what happened. Why? To shift the blame away from himself and in avoidance of accountability.”
Highlighting how Pino wasn’t truthful about how the crash happened, she told jurors Pino was not likely truthful when he said he only drank “two beers” on the day of the crash. Jurors are not aware that Pino refused to voluntarily submit to a blood alcohol test and that law enforcement failed to obtain a warrant for the sample the night of the crash.
READ MORE: How investigators, prosecutors bungled probe into boat crash that killed teen girl
In the FWC’s final report on the crash, Thompson states Pino declined to voluntarily submit his blood because his attorney wasn’t present. But, Thompson’s body camera footage shows Pino actually said no because he had ‘‘two beers.”
While Pino was not charged with boating under the influence, the alcohol consumed during the outing was a prominent feature of the trial. Adams even referred to the time between when Pino accelerated his boat and the impact with the channel marker as “a stupor.”
Adams emphasized that Pino’s wife testified that Pino packed the drinks on the boat. The day after the crash, the boat was found to contain 61 empty and partially empty booze bottles and cans, after FWC officers pulled the boat from the bay. Pino’s attorneys have said the empty bottles and cans came from boats tied up at the sandbar with them.
READ MORE: 61 booze containers on crashed boat in Keys — and parents outraged over minor charges
Adams pointed how the four girls who testified in the trial admitted they consumed alcohol, despite being under the legal drinking age of 21. Camila Alvarez, one of the teens on the boat, testified that she drank 10 hard lemonade seltzers. She was 17 at the time.
Pino allowed alcohol to flow freely to the teen girls, the prosecutor said, because he wanted to be the “cool dad.”
“How irresponsible,” Adams said. “...With a boat full of buzzed teenagers, if not drunk teenagers, this man decides to set course for that channel marker.”
‘Lightning fast’
The prosecutor replayed camera footage that captured a FWC boat traveling around the same speed as Pino’s at the time of the crash. The re-enactment videos were meant to show Pino had an unobstructed path on the waterway during the nine seconds before he slammed into Channel Marker 15, the last marker before getting to the docks at Ocean Reef.
Lt. Paul Alber, a boat crash expert, testified that in the nine seconds leading up to the crash, Pino traveled the length of two football fields while going 47 mph, which Adams called “lightning fast” on the water.
Adams reminded jurors of how Alber testified the number of people on the Robalo — 14 people — added an extra 1,000 pounds to the vessel. In order to reach the speed Pino was going with the amount of weight on the boat, Pino was going full throttle, Alber said.
Adams likened the conditions on the boat to having a bunch of teenagers — with no seatbelts or airbags — in the back of a pick-up truck and zipping down an unpaved road.
Adams stressed that Pino had nine seconds to avoid hitting the channel marker, and that evidence from the boat’s GPS amounted to the navigational device being “a witness.” The prosecutor had jurors sit in silence after setting a timer on her phone for nine seconds.
“That’s a long time to not look at what’s in front of you,” Adams said. “...This tells you he’s guilty. No responsible operator of a vessel would ever do this.”
Retorting the narrative that the crash was “just an accident,” Adams said claiming that Pino “didn’t mean to” crash is not a defense.
“But just because you didn’t mean to cause something terrible, if you were likely to cause something terrible..., the law says you’re responsible,” the prosecutor said. “There are consequences for your actions.”
During her closing argument, Adams also questioned Pino’s wife’s testimony that Pino was torn up by the crash, showing the jury social media posts shared months after the crash.
In the photos, taken in December 2022, Pino was smiling alongside his family. (Cecilia Pino testified that one of the photos was taken on a trip to the Florida Panhandle and the other for their daughter’s graduation.)
“Their daughter is barely cold in her grave, and this is what was posted,” Adams said, referencing Lucy Fernandez’s parents, Andres and Melissa Fernandez.
This story was originally published June 22, 2026 at 10:34 AM with the headline "Pino boat crash was ‘not just an accident’ but recklessness, prosecutor says."
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