6 Tahoe capsizing victims had alcohol in their system, toxicology reports find
Six of the eight people who died in a boat capsizing incident on Lake Tahoe in June had alcohol in their systems, according to toxicology reports reviewed by The Sacramento Bee included with the victims’ autopsies.
The reports, obtained from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office and first reported by the San Jose Mercury News, provide little new information about the passengers on a Chris-Craft vessel that flipped amid a sudden storm on June 21. The 10 people on board the boat, two of whom survived, were family and friends celebrating a birthday.
Drowning was determined to be the cause of death for all eight victims, who were thrown into the water near D.L. Bliss State Park after waves estimated as high as 10 feet began quickly crashing down.
The six victims who were drinking before they died had blood alcohol concentrations ranging from 0.013% to 0.068%, the autopsy reports showed. THC, a compound present in cannabis, was also found in the blood of two of those six victims.
California law prohibits operating a recreational boat with a blood alcohol content of 0.08% or higher. None of the eight people who died on the capsized boat were found to have BACs above that legal limit.
It remains unknown who was driving the boat when it capsized. Josh Pickles, a DoorDash executive from San Francisco who had a vacation home on Tahoe’s west shore and brought the group on the water that Saturday to celebrate his mother’s 71st birthday, had no alcohol in his blood, his autopsy report concluded.
A preliminary report on the accident release July 23 by the National Transportation Safety Board said that none of the eight passengers who died were wearing life jackets when the vessel, called “Over the Moon,” flipped after its engine failed.
The NTSB is continuing to investigate the incident. The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office is also investigating.
The victims were Pickles; his parents, Paula Bozinovich, 71, and Terry Pickles, 73, from Redwood City; Pickles’ uncle, Peter Bayes, 72, from Lincoln; Timothy O’Leary, 71, from Auburn; Theresa Giullari, 66, and James “Jim” Guck, 69, from Honeoye, New York; and Stephen Lindsay, 63, from Springwater, New York.
Two El Dorado County coroner’s detectives who responded to the capsizing at D.L. Bliss State Park wrote in the autopsy reports that they arrived at the park’s Lester Beach to find six dead bodies, covered in sheets and blankets, lying on a dock. Two more victims would be recovered from the water over the following two days.
After examining the six initially recovered victims, the detectives went to Barton Memorial Hospital in South Lake Tahoe to speak with the two women who survived the accident, Julie Lindsay, and her daughter, Amy Friduss.
One of the survivors, whose name was redacted in the released reports, said she had been treated for hypothermia after swimming to the shore, according to reports by Det. Michael Elledge.
She “had lost friends and family members and was understandably unable to recall the entire incident,” Elledge wrote.
