There are mentions of sandals (2 victims), slip-on shoes, ugg boots (two victims), slippers (2 victims)...
I have rarely seen people donning any of those to slip into their sleeping bags on SoCal boats (no bed linen were provided on the TA boats). Weather was nice on Sept 1-2, 2019, but not warm enough at night, especially at sea, to not use a sleeping bag. Some people will only use the provided blanket, especially if out of state and not used to the crude accommodations of SoCal liveaboards, but that does not seem to be the case of most passengers on that trip. And even then, I am not sure what sandals would do to protect from the cold.
Just be aware that coroner's reports have no pretension to establish a likely scenario and are open to interpretation. In fact, in one case I know intimately, the report was of absolutely no help in reconstituting the accident (which had several witnesses and a detailed police report, so that was luckily not necessary).
However, the present ones certainly raise many questions, besides the nature of the footwear found on some of the victims:
Why were all remains identifiable (by forensic analysis) but for one, limited to "a partial spine and pelvis" (which did not stop the coroner from establishing the cause of death as "smoke inhalation", next-to-last report)?
Why does one of the reports not refer once to burn marks, and quotes one of the lowest amount of CO detected in her remains? She was the youngest, and indeed the last one to be found, having drifted away in the kelp (last report). Scientific literature shows that young fire victims rarely succumb to such low CO % (
https://doi.org/10.1016/0379-0738(91)90091-V).
Heather's article and her expressed hope that her sister died innocently in her sleep (hope that I initially shared), is probably not the final word on this tragedy, at least as far as other victims are concerned.
