George Pino had nine seconds to see a channel marker ahead of him as he steered his 29-foot Robalo Center Console with 12 passengers across Biscayne Bay on Labor Day Weekend in 2022.
It was plenty of time for him to take evasive action, state prosecutors said last week, during Pino’s trial on charges of second-degree manslaughter and vessel homicide.
Instead, at nearly 50 miles per hour, Pino’s boat barreled into the stationary concrete object topped by a neon green square. The impact crumpled the right side of the vessel, sending all the occupants into the water, including 17-year-old Luciana “Lucy” Fernandez, who drowned as a result of the crash. Two other teens were seriously injured, including Katerina “Katy” Puig, now 21, who had a blood clot removed from the right side of her brain and now uses a wheelchair.
Pino, CEO of Doral-based State Street Realty, faced misdemeanor charges of careless boating after the accident four years ago, but prosecutors issued the more serious charges in 2024. His trial began on June 8th, and the defense rested on Wednesday.
The crash
It was a birthday celebration for his daughter’s birthday with 11 of her friends. But in nine seconds, their lives were blown apart like the Robalo’s fiberglass hull.
Pino’s criminal charges do not include the injuries to the other teens, including Puig, but her parents have a pending civil lawsuit against him and his wife, Cecelia Pino, who testified during the trial.
The Pinos had taken their daughter, Cecilia “Little Ceci” Pino, and 11 of her friends to a sandbar in Elliott Key. The boat excursion was part of a daylong celebration for Little Ceci. The group was heading back to the Pinos’ rental home at Ocean Reef Club for a dinner party when the crash occurred.
Prosecutors took two weeks to lay out their case for 10 jurors that Pino operated the boat in a reckless manner and should be held responsible for Fernandez’s death.
Pino’s defense attorneys countered that their client broke no boating laws, and witnesses testified that he was an unimpaired captain involved in a tragic accident that could happen to any boater.
He is not accused of driving under the influence, but prosecutors have leaned on Pino’s admission to an investigator that he had “two beers.” Pino was not asked to take a sobriety test shortly after the accident, but 61 empty alcohol containers were later recovered from his capsized boat.
Pino previously claimed he lost control because of a large wake from another vessel, a theory prosecutors dismissed as a “phantom boat” he made up to avoid blame.
Courtroom drama
The trial moved between grief-stricken witnesses, technical testimony and open courtroom tension with Judge Marisa Tinkler Mendez repeatedly stepping in to keep order. On the first day, Pino broke down during his defense attorney’s opening statements, prompting Tinkler Mendez to pause the trial.
The following day, the judge blasted Pino and his supporters after she noticed spectators repeatedly walked up to Pino and hugged him, calling it “absolutely unacceptable.”
“This is a court of law,” Tinkler Mendez warned. “We’re not at a sporting event, not at a social event.”
Pino was warned several times not to engage in public displays of affection in front of the jury, but that he kept doing it, Assistant State Attorney Laura Adams told the judge.
The tension kept building as the trial went on.
After jurors were dismissed on the fifth day, Adams confronted Pino over what she said were comments under his breath and staring at her from the defense table.
“I’m sorry, do you have something you want to say to me?” Adams said, looking at Pino. “Why are you staring at me?”
Pino claimed he was simply looking at the gallery behind her: “I don’t have anything to say to you.” Three days later, after testimony concluded, one of Pino’s defense lawyers accused Adams of staring down Pino and rolling her eyes when his wife was on the stand the previous day.
Witnesses had difficulty holding their composure on the stand.
On the second day, Lucy’s father, Miami banking attorney Andres “Andy” Fernandez, broke down when he recalled his daughter’s last moments of life at a Kendall hospital. On the eighth day, Cecilia Pino sobbed through her recollection of the crash and its immediate aftermath when she was in the water trying to account for the other passengers.
She described how she kept asking the girls, “Who is missing? Who is missing?”
Law enforcement witnesses and evidence
The most visceral moments came when the jury was shown body-camera footage and rescue video from the crash scene. Some of those clips were so upsetting that members of Lucy’s family left the courtroom in tears.
In addition to the body-camera footage, the state’s case relied heavily on law enforcement testimony, GPS data and a police reenactment of Pino’s trajectory during the nine seconds prosecutors allege he could have avoided the channel marker.
Jurors watched footage of Pino speaking with Florida Fish and Wildlife Lt. William Thompson soon after the crash. “I’m pretty sure that was Lucy,” Pino is seen telling the officer. Thompson later testified that Pino told him he swam to Lucy and waited until another boat arrived. Thompson said Pino blamed another boat for the crash, a key point for prosecutors who argued Pino was already building a false explanation for what happened.
Palm Beach Police Lt. Paul Alber, a boating accident expert, testified that Pino’s boat covered roughly the length of two football fields in the nine seconds before impact. Alber tied that analysis to the boat’s GPS data, giving the jury a time-and-distance framework for the state’s argument that even though Pino was navigating through a tight route, the marker was visible for him to avoid it had he been paying attention.
Physical evidence reinforced that narrative. Jurors took a field trip to a storage yard where they viewed and boarded the wrecked boat. They were shown underwater crash-scene video and footage of the reenactment that showed a police vessel speeding toward the channel marker, narrowly avoiding it.
The jury also heard from Dr. David Fintan Garavan, a former Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office pathologist, who said Fernandez’s official cause of death was drowning but that she also suffered significant blunt-force trauma when the boat hit the steel marker.
Defense testimony
Pino’s defense attorneys tried to shift the focus from culpability to confusion, and its most important witness was Boca Raton neurologist Dr. Diana Barratt. She testified that Pino may have suffered a traumatic brain injury and that such an injury can lead to amnesia and false memories. “They’re filling in the gaps with a false memory without the intention of deceiving people,” Barratt told jurors.
Barratt concluded that Pino showed signs of brain injury after the crash, based on law enforcement and medical reports. She pointed to his unconsciousness, amnesia and confusion in the immediate aftermath, including first-responder interactions in which he appeared disoriented. On cross-examination, though, prosecutors noted that his brain scan was normal when he was taken to a hospital after the crash. Adams got Barratt to confirm the defense team paid her nearly $30,000 for her Pino evaluation.
Two passengers aboard the boat testified that Pino was not boating recklessly. Claudia Portocarrero, 21, said she had known the families since early childhood and that she did not see Pino drinking or acting impaired.
She said she and others were singing and waving before the collision. “I just remember opening my eyes after the impact and seeing like a lot of white,” she said. “The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was George, and I thought he was dead.” Portocarrero said she helped keep Katy Puig afloat until a rescue boat arrived.
Another passenger, Natalia Reed, testified that Pino did not seem intoxicated or impaired. Cecilia Pino said she did not see her husband drinking and was occupied with sending videos to the girls’ mothers when the crash happened.
Her account underscored the chaos after impact.
“The next thing I remember is being on the side of the boat,” she testified, saying she tried to keep the girls together as the vessel listed and water came over the side. She said she did not see anything near them before the crash and that she was focused on getting the girls to safety.
The defense used the post-crash rescue to argue that Pino reacted like a person in shock. One witness said Pino immediately went under the boat after being told to look for Lucy, and that Pino’s own statements to first responders — including his belief that another boat caused the wreck — were framed as the product of injury and confusion.