After 4 years, trial begins for captain in California boat fire that killed 34

A trial for the captain of the Conception dive boat began Tuesday, four years after 34 people were killed in a horrific fire on the vessel in one of the deadliest accidents in recent U.S. maritime history.

Jerry Boylan has pleaded not guilty to a felony charge of misconduct or neglect of a ship officer in the fatal fire near Santa Cruz Island off Santa Barbara on Sept. 2, 2019.

The indictment against Boylan accuses him of being the first person to abandon ship during the inferno, failing to train his crew on how to handle such an emergency and neglecting to have a roving patrol that prosecutors argue could have detected the fire in time to stop it.

Boylan's attorneys have been filing a slew of motions on his behalf, including one to stop photos of those killed in the fire from being shown in court and another to prevent them from being referred to as "victims."

Here's what you need to know about Boylan's long-awaited trial:

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Who was killed in the fire on Conception?

The victims of the Conception disaster included one crew member and 33 passengers who were on an adventurous holiday scuba-diving trip.

Those killed ranged in age from 16 to 62 and came from all over the U.S. and beyond, including Beijing, Singapore, Germantown, Tennessee, and Santa Cruz, California.

They included a hair dresser, a Hollywood visual-effects designer, an Apple executive and two teenage girls who did everything together.

“You don’t expect to have a child that dies before you,” Vicki Moore told KTVU-TV in Oakland after the fire killed her 26-year-old daughter Kendra Chan and Moore's husband, 59-year-old Scott Chan.

How did the fire on the Conception start and why couldn't the passengers escape?

The National Transportation Safety Board found that the origin of the fire was likely near the stern of the ship inside a salon where there was a highly combustible polyethylene trash can under the stairs to the upper deck, according to its report of the disaster. The report did not specify what might have started a fire in the trash can, though Boylan's attorneys and prosecutors have been arguing over whether it's admissible that he's a smoker.

The board found that Boylan's failure to post a roving night patrol on the Conception allowed the 3 a.m. fire to spread so fast that it trapped 34 people below deck. The safety board also faulted the U.S. Coast Guard for failing to enforce the patrol requirement.

“As a result of the alleged failures of Captain Boylan to follow well-established safety rules, a pleasant holiday dive trip turned into a hellish nightmare as passengers and one crew member found themselves trapped in a fiery bunkroom with no means of escape,” U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna said in a statement shortly after the safety board's report in October 2020.

When and where is the trial against Jerry Boylan?

Boylan's trial began Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles with jury selection. Opening statements in the case are likely on Wednesday, and the trial is expected to last about 10 days.

If convicted, Boylan faces up to 10 years in prison.

His attorneys did not respond to USA TODAY's requests for comment Tuesday.

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Why can't the passengers of the Conception be referred to as "victims" at trial?

Boylan's defense attorneys argued that the word "victims" shouldn't be used in front of jurors, saying it subverts the presumption of innocence and violates Boylan's right to a fair trial. They argued that the victims should be referred to with a neutral term, like "decedents."

"The issue at the heart of this criminal case is whether Mr. Boylan’s conduct caused the deaths of the decedents," wrote one of Boylan's attorneys, Cuauhtemoc Ortega, in an Oct. 10 motion obtained by USA TODAY.

"If that question is answered in the negative, then the decedents were not victims of Mr. Boylan’s," he continued. "Referring to them as 'victims,' then, tells the jury that Mr. Boylan has committed a crime — a determination that must be left to them alone."

Prosecutors called those arguments "nonsense."

"The victims were alive and well when they went to sleep on September 1, 2019, and then they were killed in the fire," they wrote. "They died regardless of whether defendant caused their deaths due to his gross negligence, misconduct, and inattention to duties, although the evidence at trial will show that he did."

Judge George Wu ruled in the defense's favor on Oct. 12, though didn't explain why.

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Prosecutors, defense spar over Conception victim photos

Defense attorneys also argue that prosecutors should not be allowed to show "devastating" pictures of the victims' autopsies, photos and videos taken by the passengers in the hours before the fire, or clips from a dive video taken after the fire that showed victims huddling together in a bunkroom.

"This is not a sadistic, pre-meditated murder case with a contested cause of death," Ortega wrote in an Oct. 18 motion obtained by USA TODAY.

He wrote that autopsy photos "have little to no probative value," will "fan the jurors' emotions" and are "a waste of time." He said the photos of the victims while they were living, as well as the dive videos showing their bodies "have no relevancy to this trial" and also amount to an inflammatory "waste of time."

Prosecutors called the filing "a last-ditch attempt to nullify the jury" and that not allowing the photos and video would be "a miscarriage of justice."

They said they wanted to show jurors "a very limited number" of autopsy photos to "prove that the victims were alive and rescuable" when the fire broke out and eight clips from the dive video showing the victims huddling together in the bunkroom, "proving that they were awake during the fire, in need of rescue, and also that they never escaped from the bunkroom."

The photos and video are "relevant to defendant’s gross negligence in not detecting the fire earlier and abandoning the victims to save himself," they argued.

Wu had not ruled on the issue by Tuesday.

Family members of those killed in the Conception fire told the AP that the fact that their loved ones won't be called "victims" at trial has only added to their pain during what's been a long wait for justice.

Kathleen McIlvain, whose 44-year-old son Charles was killed, said: “The past four years have been like living in a nightmare that you don’t wake up from,”

Amanda Lee Myers is a trending reporter and editor with USA TODAY. She covers news and human interest stories.