According to their autopsies, four of the seven people who perished in the Bayesian superyacht tragedy last month were trapped alive within the ship’s cabins when it sank off the coast of Sicily.
According to tests performed over the past two days, Chris Morvillo, a lawyer in New York City, and his wife Neda, as well as Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley Bank International, and his wife Judy, all passed away from “dry drowning,” according to Italian publication la Repubblica.
The four people on board the 185-foot sailboat did not perish in the sea when the ship started to sink during a storm on August 19 because none of them had water in their stomachs, trachea, or lungs.
The four victims huddled in an air bubble that ran out of oxygen and turned toxic from carbon dioxide, according to pathologists with the Palermo Institute of Forensic Medicine. They perished asphyxiated.
According to the Italian publication, they claimed that “death by confinement” was the reason behind the victims’ deaths.
The $40 million yacht’s left cabin room contained the bodies of the Bloomers, the Morvillos, and Mike Lynch, the millionaire British technologist who owned the vessel.
Hannah, Lynch’s eighteen-year-old daughter, was found dead in the adjacent room, likewise on the left side of the hull.
The victims were probably awake when the ship sunk to the ocean floor and sat tilted to its right, heading inside the rooms that filled with water last in the hopes of discovering air pockets.
However, as the victims exhaled carbon dioxide and inhaled the remainder of the oxygen, the air pockets soon turned toxic.
The local site stated that Angela Bacares, the mother of Hannah and wife of Lynch, attempted to alert people below the ship’s deck but was hurt by shattered glass and was unable to reach the cabins before they swiftly filled with water.
Bacares was one of the boat’s fifteen surviving passengers and staff members.
Renaldo Thomas, the ship’s cook, was one of the crew members who tragically perished. Beside the overturned yacht, his body was discovered floating.
La Repubblica stated that more testing is required to verify that the four victims passed away from “dry drowning.”
Lynch, Hannah, and Thomas’s bodies will undergo autopsies on Friday.
Although the exact cause of the ship’s sinking is unknown, severe weather is thought to have had a role.
Investigations are underway into the possibility that three Bayesian crew members—including Captain James Cutfield—were responsible for the shipwreck and negligent manslaughter.
