It started as the kind of evening that makes life worth living. Good friends, good food, and later a leisurely boat ride under the stars on the waters near Bay Head. For Bob Post, it promised a welcome respite from another Manhattan work week.
The night before, Bob had driven down the Shore to spend the weekend with his family at their waterfront condo in Point Pleasant. He and Bonnie, his wife of 25 years, had had dinner with friends at the Bay Head Yacht Club. This night—Saturday, August 2, 2008—they would entertain much the same group at the condo.
Saturday afternoon, Bonnie picked up her summer standbys: butter steak from Arctic Market & Butcher, mozzarella from Joe Leone’s, fresh corn and tomatoes. As evening approached, Bob suggested he take the Boston Whaler, the smaller of the Posts’ two boats, to pick up their guests. Karen Kelly, Bonnie and Bob’s longtime friend, was staying at her family’s bayfront home in Bay Head. Joan and Cliff Farren—a couple from Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, whom the Posts had become friendly with five years earlier—were renting a place nearby. Bob suggested the Farrens ride their bikes to Karen’s house; he would pick up everyone there.
It was a low-key evening. For Karen, it was the final night of an extended stay down the Shore. She planned to fly home to Norcross, Georgia, in the morning. The dinner group included Bob and Bonnie’s son Bobby, who at 19 had just finished his freshman year at Colby College. The Posts’ younger son, 12-year-old John, was in Delaware, sailing with Bonnie’s sister, Donna.
They ate a quiet dinner on the deck overlooking Barnegat Bay. Bonnie opened a bottle of Shiraz to serve with the steaks. As the evening wore on, the bottle was barely half empty. Bonnie wondered if her friends disliked the wine she had chosen.
Sometime after 11 pm, the party wound down. As Bob prepared to take the guests on the short boat ride back to Karen’s place, Bonnie noticed that the wind had picked up. She decided to come along in case Bob needed help maneuvering the boat back into the slip.
It was a beautiful, dark night, with a high, star-filled sky. As they pulled away from the condo, someone suggested a longer ride, up the Point Pleasant Canal and through Manasquan Inlet to the ocean.
Bob didn’t require much prodding. “Any excuse to have a longer boat ride,” says Bonnie, sharing her memories of the fateful evening. “He would never say no.”
Bob and Bonnie first crossed paths growing up in Essex Fells, when they were on the same swim team at the local country club. But Bob was three years younger than Bonnie and barely on her teenage radar. “I remember him winning the most-improved swimmer award,” says Bonnie, who was then in sixth grade. “He was this big kid, with blond, curly hair.”
Bonnie and her family lived in New Jersey from time to time throughout her childhood. She was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, where her father was serving in the Army. Robert Weber became a chemical engineer, and his career shuttled the family back and forth between Ohio and New Jersey every few years. Bonnie attended grade school in Essex Fells—the same school her mother, Barbara, had attended as a child. During one stay in Jersey, Bonnie graduated from West Morris Mendham High School.
Bob, on the other hand, spent his entire childhood in Essex Fells. His parents, Bloomfield native Richard Post and Montclair-born Helen Young, had moved to the wooded suburb when he was three. Bob went to Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair and studied economics and geology at Colgate University.
By the time Bob graduated from Colgate in 1981, Bonnie had finished her studies at the University of Vermont and started a career as a pediatric nurse, first in Denver and then in Dallas, where her parents had settled with her two younger sisters. Seeking opportunities in the petroleum industry, Bob also headed to Texas. His parents remembered that the Webers were living in Dallas and gave him their phone number in case he needed a place to stay. When he called, Barbara Weber invited the young man to dinner. He stayed for two weeks.
Bob and Bonnie both found jobs in Houston and began to see a lot of each other. “We went to rodeos,” Bonnie says. “We did all the Texas things.” When Bob was handed a three-month assignment to supervise an oil rig in Oklahoma, Bonnie, who had had enough of Houston, moved back east. On one of Bob’s frequent visits, they went skiing together at Mad River Glen, Vermont. In front of the fireplace one evening, Bob surprised Bonnie by proposing marriage. “I was 26 at that point. He was only 23,” Bonnie says. “I just thought he wasn’t ready for that yet.” But Bob had made up his mind.
They married seven months later in July 1983 at St. Peter’s Church in Essex Fells. In 1985, after Bob had completed graduate school at Dartmouth and begun his finance career with JP Morgan in New York, they moved back to New Jersey, first to Bloomfield and then Verona. In 1992, they bought Bob’s parents’ house in Essex Fells, then moved again in 2003, purchasing a five-bedroom home on a wooded lot in Essex Fells. It was the perfect place to raise a family and entertain guests.
Bob Post was just seven when he began taking lessons in seamanship from his aunt Joan Young, a Navy captain who lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He was in his teens when Young purchased a 1975 Boston Whaler Katama, an open boat with a steering console behind two bucket seats for passengers. Young turned the 16-foot, 90-horsepower Whaler into a floating classroom for Bob. Years later, she sold the boat to Bob and Bonnie.
Young taught Bob to be a stickler for boating safety. In 1998, he and Bonnie took the safety course given by the United States Power Squadrons at the Lincoln Harbor Yacht Club in Weehawken. More recently, Bob had earned his captain’s license. His dream, Bonnie says, was to captain a boat in the tropics. “Every time we went to the Caribbean, he put an ad in the paper to find a job down there,” she recalls.
Guiding the Whaler through the waters around Bay Head was second nature to Bob. Still, he never slacked off on safety precautions. When Bonnie was aboard, she was the designated lookout. During night-time rides, she scanned the waters around the Whaler with a powerful handheld spotlight. But as they cruised north up the Point Pleasant Canal in the early hours of August 3, Joan Farren—known to all as Jody—was handling the spotlight, seated alongside Bob at the wheel and casting the light back and forth between the green and red buoys that marked the channel.
Cliff Farren sat up front in the bucket seat next to Bonnie. Karen Kelly, whose bad back was bothering her, hunkered down on the floor of the boat at their feet. As the wind picked up, Bonnie put a flotation pillow under Karen’s head and covered her shivering body with a heavy blue tarp. The wind on the canal intensified, and water started splashing over the bow. Soaked, Bonnie turned to Bob and suggested they head back.
Bob turned the Whaler toward the south end of the canal, which opens into the head of Barnegat Bay. Once on the bay, they could turn to starboard and cruise west up the Metedeconk River, which Bob figured would be less windy. It was a ride the group had made many times. “We went almost to the head of the Metedeconk until it got too narrow,” recalls Bonnie. Once again, Bob turned the boat around and headed back to the bay.
Following the buoys that marked the channel out of the Metedeconk, Bob turned to port where the river gives way to the bay. “He never cut corners,” says Bonnie. “He always followed the cones. Everybody else cut corners, but Bob was always where he was supposed to be.”
As Jody pointed the spotlight into the bay, Cliff looked up and noticed a shooting star. Bob, standing at the wheel, told Karen he’d have her home in five minutes.
Anthony DiGilio, a 29-year-old construction and electrical worker from Brick, had spent the day on the water, cruising the Atlantic with his girlfriend, Krista Behrend, in his 27-foot powerboat, a 1986 Imperial Mono with a walloping 500-horsepower Mercury Bravo engine. About 8 pm they docked the white powerboat at Jack Baker’s Wharfside Restaurant, a popular waterfront spot for boaters on Manasquan Inlet, just off the ocean in Point Pleasant Beach. After coming ashore, DiGilio and Behrend walked to Jenkinson’s North Inlet Bar a few blocks away, where an awards ceremony and dinner were taking place for a local boating group.
After about an hour, the couple walked back to the Wharfside, arriving at the bar at about 10:15 pm. Behrend’s credit card receipt later indicated that they purchased two drinks. Eventually, DiGilio and Behrend decided to call it a night. They boarded the Imperial around midnight and headed back to Brick. To get there, they would have to travel south through Point Pleasant Canal and cross the head of Barnegat Bay where it meets the Metedeconk.
Karen Kelly was under the tarp at the moment of impact. She felt the Whaler spin slightly as her head jerked back against the cushions. At first she thought they had smacked into a buoy. “I didn’t know the magnitude of what had just transpired,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine what it was.”
Then she heard the screams. Cliff Farren had turned to the rear of the boat to see if his wife was okay. Instead he saw two limp bodies—Bob and Jody—covered with blood. Jody was wedged between the steering console and the side of the boat. It was too much for Cliff. He began to scream profanities, shouting that Bob and Jody were dead.
Karen sat up under the tarp and surveyed the ghastly scene. Bonnie had fallen into Karen’s lap, bleeding from the head and barely conscious. Lifting herself, Karen peeked over the console and caught a glimpse of Bob. “I could see his knee and I could see a trickle of blood that had stopped on his leg.” Jody and Bonnie were moaning—proof they were alive. “It sounded like a battlefield,” says Karen. “Like I would imagine when people have been shot all around you.”
Karen pulled out her cell phone and punched in 911. Calmed by the 911 operator, she communicated the situation, explaining that they had hit something and there were serious injuries on board. Cliff was still hysterical as he tried to tend to Jody’s injuries. He glanced at Bob, but turned away in horror. His friend’s head appeared to be gone.
Taking the phone, Cliff described the boat’s location to the 911 operator, who by then had patched in the state police. The operator asked Cliff if he could take Bob’s pulse, but Cliff could not bear to look again in Bob’s direction. “There’s an awful lot of blood,” he told the operator. “I’m holding onto his leg, but don’t feel anything.” In the background, Jody mumbled, “….broke my jaw.” Desperately, Cliff pleaded to the 911 operator, “Oh dear God, oh dear God, pray for us.”
Guided by the GPS coordinates tracked from Karen’s cell phone, a state police boat arrived at the scene within 25 minutes. Approaching slowly, Sergeant Dennis Johnson and Trooper Sean Reader of the New Jersey State Police cast a spotlight on the Whaler. “You could see a large chunk out of the starboard side,” says Reader. “As I got closer, you could see one person was clearly dead on board, and there was a lot of blood. People were huddled together with other injuries.”
Reader and Johnson tried drawing information out of the conscious passengers, but found “they didn’t have anything to offer,” says Reader. “You would think they would see [what they had hit] or have something to report, but they were asking us what happened.”
The officers towed the Whaler to the nearby shore, where ambulances and a helicopter were waiting. As they were being helped off the Whaler, Cliff turned to Karen and told her in no uncertain terms: “Whatever you do, don’t look at Bob.”
Taking a closer look at the Whaler, the officers began to draw their initial conclusions about the accident. “It was clear the boat was hit and overrun by a larger boat,” recalls Reader.
A helicopter airlifted Bonnie and Jody to Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune. The ball of Bonnie’s left shoulder had been split in half, her left arm nearly severed, her back lacerated and her left ear split open. Jody had a concussion and internal bleeding. Her jaw had been smashed and several ribs broken. Flying chunks of the shattered Whaler had deeply gouged her face from her mouth to her right ear and severed the bottom of the same ear. Cliff was badly shaken and his right hand broken. As the helicopter took off, Karen and Cliff were loaded into an ambulance bound for the same hospital.
As for Bob, an autopsy report later would describe his injuries in horrific detail. The cause of death was listed as “multiple traumatic injuries including open craniofacial fractures.” His face had been crushed, his heart ruptured and his ascending aorta lacerated. Blood had filled his lungs. Quite literally, he never knew what hit him. And as they sped toward the hospital, neither did any of the four survivors.
Bonnie doesn’t remember the exact moment she found out that her husband was dead. In the emergency room she began asking, “Where’s Bob?” But the question went unanswered. Around 3 am, the Post’s son Bobby drove to the hospital. He too had no idea what had happened to his father.
During the night, a plastic surgeon meticulously picked hundreds of fiberglass shards from Bonnie’s arms and shoulders, stitched her ear and closed the 5-inch laceration on the back of her shoulder. Her badly damaged arm was cleaned and dressed.
The next afternoon, Bonnie’s sister Donna arrived at the hospital with the Posts’ younger son, John. Somehow—she doesn’t remember how—it had become clear to Bonnie that she had to tell John that his dad was dead. The boy sat crying on big brother Bobby’s lap as Bonnie broke the news. “It was awful,” says Bonnie. “Just awful.”
Two days later, Bonnie was discharged from the hospital, her arm in a sling, the pain dreadful. Jody was hospitalized for six days. Leaving the hospital, she was in too much pain for the car ride back to Pennsylvania.
Bonnie’s family immediately rallied around her. Sister Linda changed her dressings and doled out her meds; Donna looked after the boys. Neighbors brought food. Her parents stayed with her through Labor Day.
Bob’s funeral was held six days after the accident. More than 1,000 mourners filled Caldwell’s First Presbyterian Church. Bob was eulogized as an avid sportsman with a great sense of humor and many close friends. A photo in the Star-Ledger showed a distraught Bonnie watching son Bobby comforting his little brother outside the church.
Bonnie’s rehab went on for months. Essex Fells friend Susanne Keane took on the gruesome job of packing the wound on Bonnie’s arm twice daily with a medicinal bleach solution to prevent gangrene. Friends Jane Redmond and Cheryl McMullen took turns driving her to physical therapy.
Bob Post’s death sent shockwaves through the Bay Head boating community. The morning after the accident, a flotilla of boats took to the bay looking for the mystery vessel that had hit the Whaler. The search turned out to be unnecessary.
That same morning, police received a phone call from attorney William Cunningham. His client, Anthony DiGilio, had heard about the accident and thought he may have hit the Posts’ boat. Initially, the attorney explained, DiGilio assumed he had run over a floating log or buoy. He claimed a sensor on his Imperial speedboat had indicated he was taking on water. Fearful of sinking, he had rushed back to Brick and docked the boat in the usual place at his cousin’s house. Later that morning, DiGilio had pulled the boat out of the water, storing it in a lot across from his home until he could do the necessary repairs, the attorney explained.
The following day, police went to DiGilio’s home to impound his boat. They knocked on DiGilio’s door, but he was “nowhere to be found,” says Trooper Reader. Even if he had been available for questioning, the investigators had lost valuable time—especially if alcohol had been involved. “Once he had left the scene, and there was that much time after, it’s not of any evidential value to have his blood-alcohol level tested,” says Reader. (On the other hand, a toxology lab tested Bob Post’s body for drugs and alcohol. None were detected.)
After an investigation of nearly two years, an Ocean County grand jury indicted DiGilio in February 2010 on one count of vehicular homicide and two counts of assault by a vessel. Bonnie Post and her sons would have to wait another three years before the case was tried.
From the start, Bonnie was uncomfortable with the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office. After all, DiGilio’s attorney, William Cunningham, had worked as a prosecutor there just two years before. His wife, Therese A. Cunningham, was an assistant prosecutor for the OCPO. It didn’t seem right.
Bonnie was further shocked to learn that leaving the scene of a boating accident was not a crime in New Jersey. The state police had cited DiGilio for multiple violations, including failure to report an accident resulting in death and failure to render aid, but unlike the driver of a motor vehicle, he could not be charged with hit-and-run, an indictable offense carrying a potential sentence up to 10 years in prison.
Adding to her suspicions about the OCPO, Bonnie received an anonymous letter from an individual who claimed to “work in the justice system.” The writer warned of alleged conflicts of interest at the prosecutor’s office. Bonnie should proceed “very carefully,” the writer advised.
Bonnie took her fears to the state attorney general’s office. In a letter dated September 30, 2009, she asked then attorney general Anne Milgram to reassign the case to another jurisdiction. Seven months later, she received a reply from Hester Agudosi, chief of the Prosecutor’s Supervision and Coordination Bureau in the Division of Criminal Justice. Agudosi expressed her condolences but explained that the bureau did not find any conflict of interest and declined to intercede. Bonnie’s request became moot when, shortly after the indictment, DiGilio replaced Cunningham with a new defense lawyer, one with a national reputation for winning difficult cases.
Joseph Tacopina was no stranger to the spotlight. Past clients included Michael Jackson and several big-time rap stars. He had famously won an acquittal for Jordan van der Sloot, the Dutch teen charged in the disappearance of Alabama tourist Natalee Holloway in Aruba. Later, he represented Alex Rodriguez in his attempt to overturn his ban by Major League Baseball. In his motion for temporary admission to the New Jersey bar for the DiGilio case, Tacopina stated that he was “uniquely qualified to manage the press coverage in this case…and effectively insulate and protect the defendant during the litigation process.”
As the criminal case crawled toward a trial date, Bonnie, Karen and the Farrens filed separate civil suits against DiGilio, seeking damages as high as $3 million in Bonnie’s case. But the Farrens also filed a similar suit against Bob Post, claiming he had, at least in part, caused the accident. Cliff Farren says he did so at the advice of his attorney because the “facts in the case were unclear.” The suit also enlarged the available pool of insurance money, which could allow the Posts to collect more from DiGilio’s insurer. DiGilio also filed a counterclaim against the Posts, claiming Bob was at fault. The suits were settled out of court for sums that remain confidential.
The criminal trial finally began on April 3, 2013, in State Superior Court in Toms River, Judge Francis R. Hodgson Jr. presiding. Senior assistant prosecutor Hillary Bryce led the case on behalf of the state, assisted by chief assistant prosecutor William J. Heisler.
Going in, there were many unanswered questions. How was it possible that those on the Whaler didn’t see or hear the big, loud Imperial? Were the bow lights on both boats illuminated? Which boat had the right of way as they converged? And why did DiGilio leave the scene without checking to see what he had hit?
The prosecution’s case seemed strong. To win a guilty verdict on the key charge, vehicular homicide—which carried a potential 10-year prison sentence—the state would have to prove that DiGilio had caused Bob Post’s death by driving recklessly. No one disputed that DiGilio’s boat had crashed into and then rode over the Whaler. The state’s investigation had turned up two witnesses who would testify that they saw DiGilio’s boat on the water shortly before the crash without its bow lights on, a key factor in the prosecution’s case. The prosecution had enlisted an expert marine forensics witness, Miles Beam, who calculated that DiGilio’s boat was traveling between 50 and 69 miles per hour at the time of the accident. Further, Beam’s accident-reconstruction report described physical evidence that Beam said proved that DiGilio’s pop-up bow light was in the closed position at the time of the crash. And faint sounds on the 911 tape appeared to indicate that DiGilio had restarted his boat’s engine after the crash some unknown distance from the Whaler and pulled away from the scene.
For Tacopina’s defense team, the job was creating doubt in the minds of the 12 jurors. From the moment he became involved, Tacopina told the media that the case was a tragic accident, “but not a crime.” Entering the courtroom, he liked his odds. Without an eyewitness to the moment of the crash, he merely had to suggest that the evidence and the witnesses were shaky. The defense also planned to lean heavily on a surveillance tape discovered by police during their investigation. Tacopina believed it proved that DiGilio’s bow light was on at the time of the crash.
Cliff Farren was among the first witnesses the prosecution called. In emotional testimony, he described the moments leading up to the crash. He recalled hearing “very, very loud engines,” but added, “We didn’t see anything.”
In his cross-examination, Tacopina surprised Farren by asking him about the civil claim he and Jody had filed accusing Bob Post of causing the collision through “negligence” and “carelessness.” It was a tough moment for Farren, who had been under the impression the suit was confidential and could not be brought up in the trial. As he sat confused on the witness stand, Tacopina handed him a copy of the suit. Reluctantly, Farren acknowledged he and Jody had filed the claim. Tacopina did not press him for details.
Erik Aksdale, who had been working as a security guard at the Wharfside Patio Bar the night of the accident, testified that he had seen a white speedboat leave the dock without its lights on the night of the accident. Jack Neary, a local animal control officer, provided similar testimony.
Neary, known locally as Muskrat Jack, was fishing late the night of the accident near the Lovelandtown Bridge on the narrow Point Pleasant Canal. He told the court that he saw a white boat come down the canal with a male and female at the steering console. Neary, who had been around the water much of his life, thought it “weird” that the white boat did not have its red and green bow lights illuminated.
Cross-examining Neary, Tacopina asked him to think back about his surroundings. Couldn’t his view of the white boat have been blocked by the bridge abutment or the nearby trees? Might his vision have been impeded by the lights from the police station directly across the canal? Neary denied both—yet the seeds of doubt about his testimony had been planted.
To contradict the findings of the Beam report, Tacopina enlisted his own marine forensics expert, Kevin Breen, who concluded, based on previous crash tests, that DiGilio’s boat was travelling at only 30 to 40 miles per hour at the time of the crash. Further, he testified that an override accident could occur at speeds as low as 20 miles per hour. Breen also challenged Beam’s conclusion that DiGilio’s bow light was off.
Another critical question was who had the right of way. Both sides agreed that, under typical circumstances, it would have been DiGilio. According to Breen, under “navigation rules of the road,” boats must give way to vessels approaching on their starboard, or right, side. Looking at the damage to the Whaler, it was clear that the Imperial had smashed into its right side. “Based on how the boats approached each other, the Boston Whaler boat was responsible to give way to the Imperial,” Breen testified. On the other hand, a prosecution witness, Staff Sergeant Karl Brobst of the state police, testified that a boat forfeits the right of way if it doesn’t have the proper lighting. “Once you extinguish your navigation lights at night, you accept the burden of being the give-way vessel in all circumstances,” Brobst said.
It was during Breen’s testimony that Tacopina introduced what he felt was his strongest piece of evidence, the surveillance tape from a camera at Fisherman’s Supply, a bait-and-tackle shop near the Wharfside restaurant. Breen, who had examined the tape, testified that a boat he identified as the Imperial could be seen leaving the restaurant’s dock with its bow light on. The prosecution protested, claiming that this observation was not mentioned in Breen’s forensics report. The judge allowed Breen to testify about the tape, provided he did not mention whether or not the bow light was illuminated. It would be up to the jury to watch the tape and decide for themselves.
In his closing argument, Tacopina reminded the jurors to suppress their emotions and look at the facts. Emphasizing the surveillance tape, he repeated his position that the Imperial’s bow light was shining at the time of the accident.
After three weeks of testimony, the jury required little more than an hour to find DiGilio not guilty. With tears in his eyes, DiGilio turned to his onlooking family in relief and stood to give Tacopina a bear hug. The Post family and friends quickly left the courtroom.
Tacopina was not surprised by the outcome. Given the evidence on the surveillance tape, he questions whether the case should ever have come to trial. “When you look at everything,” he tells New Jersey Monthly, “it all favored DiGilio.”
After the trial, Heisler acknowledged that the prosecution’s case fell short, in part because DiGilio left the accident scene. “We lost potential evidence, and it hinders our investigation because you can’t do things the way you would normally do, and that hurts,” he told the Ocean Star newspaper. Bryce did not return calls for comment from New Jersey Monthly. However, Joseph D. Coronato, who became Ocean County prosecutor just a few weeks before the trial and was mostly an observer, believes justice was not served. “The justice system in this case certainly failed,” he says.
On May 14, three weeks after the trial ended, DiGilio was sentenced to pay a fine of $46, plus $33 in court costs, for failure to report an accident resulting in death, one of the six summonses issued following the accident by the state police.
In the six years since the accident, DiGilio and Behrend married and built a family. They now have four boys, including twins born a few months before the trial began. DiGilio did not return a call for comment for this story.
Tacopina has continued to make headlines. A former client, Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner, sued Tacopina for racketeering, fraud and malpractice, claiming he leaked information to federal prosecutors that led to Kerik’s 2007 indictment on eight felony charges, which included lying to the Internal Revenue Service. The case is pending.
The Farrens endured several tough years after the accident. Both saw psychologists to deal with the post-traumatic stress. A surgeon used a portion of Jody’s left ear to reconstruct the damaged right one. She still carries the scar from the gash across her face.
Bonnie Post, too, will always be scarred by the tragedy—physically and emotionally. She marvels at how close her boys were to becoming orphans that fateful night on the water. Still, she has no qualms discussing the accident. In September 2013, she purchased a Sandy-distressed home on Barnegat Bay. From the deck, she has a clear view of the accident site across the bay.
Bonnie’s son Bobby graduated from Colby and moved to Hoboken; he is working in the fixed-income department at Black Rock, an investment management firm in New York. Last winter, he spent weekends at the Post house in Essex Fells, renovating a vintage Boston Whaler much like the one destroyed in the crash. Younger son John began his college career this fall at Colgate, his father’s alma mater.
Following the accident, Bonnie began lobbying for a boating-safety law that would criminalize marine hit-and-runs in New Jersey. Working with a group called BOLTS, she made several trips to Trenton to testify on behalf of the legislation, which was signed into law in July. She takes heart knowing something good came out of Bob’s death.
Bonnie remains friendly with Karen Kelly, but has not talked with the Farrens since the civil suits were filed. Cliff Farren remains hopeful that the relationship between his family, including his three children, and Bonnie’s can be repaired.
Those on the Whaler are still convinced of DiGilio’s guilt. “I think he wasn’t paying attention,” says Kelly. “He obviously came from a bar. I don’t think he had his lights on. I think he ran us over. I think he was terrified and took off. He hid his boat. I think he was terribly guilty. Do I think he should be punished for the rest of his life? No. He made a terrible, terrible mistake that resulted in someone’s death, and I wish he had some form of punishment.”
For Cliff Farren, DiGilio’s ultimate transgression was leaving the scene. “I can’t forgive him for that,” he says.
Bonnie has stronger words for DiGilio. “We all know what he did and he knows what he did,” she says. “He and his wife, they both have to live with that.”
Additional reporting by Breanne McCarthy. Research assistance by Anna Hiatt.