Filmmaker Rob Stewart's family files wrongful death lawsuit

[cathal]

The diver who died was a customer and two companies (I presume the dive op and the operator of the boat) and two individuals are named that had a duty of care to ensure his safety. They were, according the complaint, negligent in not doing their part to ensure the safety of the diver who was still in the water and the allegation is that this is what lead to his death.

All in all my initial impression was to think, "here we go again", but after reading the complaint I can fully understand why they are being sued.

R..

If we really want to establish the actual responsibilities of each person in this tragic incident I think we would all be wise to step back and look at it through the law that applies here. Significant 'kites' have been flown on online dive forums by the attorney who states he is acting behalf of Mr.Sotis. These kites have disclosed that they will be fighting this case through the legal doctrine of Employer/Employee liability i.e. Occupational Health and Safety. These kites also disclosed that contracts by way of emails between the parties involved purport to show a company engaging AH for the purpose of dive guiding for this fatal dive. To repeat the role of AH was to provided dive guiding services only. That makes the company who hired AH the Employer and AH the Contractor or Employee for these dives. The responsibility for the dive safety management of all individuals during these dives rests firmly with the Employer.Therefore on this basis the law would say that that the deceased was not a customer as from previous posts it appears he is listed as a director of the company who employed AH for the dive guidance.

 

[Diver0001]

Well... I'm not a lawyer but it seems obvious to me that step 1 in any liability case is going to be to establish who owed whom a duty of care. As I said above, establishing liability in most legal systems requires a causal link from A leads to B leads to C. What you are saying is that the Sotis lawyer intends to undermine A, which would make anything else that happened on the day of accident irrelevant in terms of liability.

Of course the plaintiff's lawyer is going to argue exactly the opposite. They will probably tell the jury that Stewart was a "customer" just like anyone who signs up to dive on a dive boat via a dive operator. What they will tell the jury is that the boat and AH were hired to organize the dive because Stewart wasn't able to do it himself, essentially providing a context similar to any other guided dive done from a boat in Florida. In the American system it's left to the judgment of laymen to decide whose argument they believe more, but the plaintiff will have a great deal of legal precedent to support their argument based on how excursions via boat are "usually" conducted and who is "usually" found to owe a duty of care when things go wrong. That makes the Sotis defense tricky because if his tactic doesn't work he'll be left twisting in the wind with no plan-B. A lot will depend on the letter of the contract(s) that were signed.

And don't forget, there are two companies and two individuals named in the case. It may turn out that Peter Sotis himself is found not guilty because he was incapacitated at the time of the accident but there are still 3 other parties that the jury could find guilty.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It clearly won't matter to Rob Stewart anymore because he's dead but the case could have interesting ramifications for the diving industry in Florida. If the case sets a precedent for a "paying customer" to be seen as the "employer", therefore turning duty of care on its head then it could lead to a situation where crews and dive operators could get away with just about anything on the argument that the customer was in charge. I wonder if a jury of laymen will want that on their conscience.

R..

 

[Diver0001]

I'm not a CCR diver... But have been told it's takes a long time to really be able to deal with all the things that can go wrong diving one.. One guy told me the dam thing is trying to kill you if you not on top of it... As far as AH and Sotis... They seem to have a long history of pushing the envelope.. Sotis thought he was the man.. So great at diving a CCR, He was a GOD.. Guys like that scares the hell out of me.. Give me guys like Frank (wookie) or John Chatterton that are very good divers and are very humble about it... Rob was look for a cowboy that would break the rules of Learning CCR.. And he paid the price for it.. It's my guess that Rob spoke to a few CCR instructors and was told, I'm not going to teach you that way and your crazy to try and learn and dive a CCR like that.. You'll most likely get yourself killed..

Jim...

Jim, I see your point and I agree that CCR can be dangerous if used with less than the utmost care and diligence. However, three things ring through the posts you have been making.

a) you believe Peter Sotis was acting unethically
and
b) you believe Rob Stewart made some kind of newbie mistake
and
c) you believe that this is a diving accident

The complaint does not address #1 or #2 at all aside from pointing out that AH planned the dives. It does, however, address #3 because if you read carefully what is being said, it does not really argue that there was diving accident. It argues that there was a failure of proper procedure on board the boat by two companies and two individuals who should have been more on the ball than they were.

In other words, you keep coming back to what went wrong with the dive. What if you looked at it from the perspective that there WAS no dive happening when the accident took place? The dive was over. The divers were on the surface trying to get back on a boat. That's where things went wrong.

A number of years ago the shop where I was working had an accident during a guided dive. A diver was standing on a pier adjusting his weight belt and had a heart attack. When he collapsed he rolled into the water and it was investigated as a "diving accident" because he was dressed in diving gear and he was apparently in the water when he died.

Was it a diving accident? You tell me. Is it a diving accident when the dive is over and the divers are apparently safely back on the surface and trying to get on the boat, or is it a "boating" accident? What appears to be the tactic here is that the plaintiff wants this handled as a "boating" accident and wants to look at what happend on the boat that allowed one person to pass out and sink without anyone noticing it while at the same time they managed to save another person who was having (possibly) a similar problem.

You're blustering a lot about how this shouldn't have happend and how everyone involved are a bunch of idiots but if you look at it from the point of view of it being a problem with surface support and not a problem with the dive itself, then a different picture emerges.

R..

 

[kelemvor]

Jim, I see your point and I agree that CCR can be dangerous if used with less than the utmost care and diligence. However, three things ring through the posts you have been making.

a) you believe Peter Sotis was acting unethically
and
b) you believe Rob Stewart made some kind of newbie mistake
and
c) you believe that this is a diving accident

The complaint does not address #1 or #2 at all aside from pointing out that AH planned the dives. It does, however, address #3 because if you read carefully what is being said, it does not really argue that there was diving accident. It argues that there was a failure of proper procedure on board the boat by two companies and two individuals who should have been more on the ball than they were.

In other words, you keep coming back to what went wrong with the dive. What if you looked at it from the perspective that there WAS no dive happening when the accident took place? The dive was over. The divers were on the surface trying to get back on a boat. That's where things went wrong.

A number of years ago the shop where I was working had an accident during a guided dive. A diver was standing on a pier adjusting his weight belt and had a heart attack. When he collapsed he rolled into the water and it was investigated as a "diving accident" because he was dressed in diving gear and he was apparently in the water when he died.

Was it a diving accident? You tell me. Is it a diving accident when the dive is over and the divers are apparently safely back on the surface and trying to get on the boat, or is it a "boating" accident? What appears to be the tactic here is that the plaintiff wants this handled as a "boating" accident and wants to look at what happend on the boat that allowed one person to pass out and sink without anyone noticing it while at the same time they managed to save another person who was having (possibly) a similar problem.

You're blustering a lot about how this shouldn't have happend and how everyone involved are a bunch of idiots but if you look at it from the point of view of it being a problem with surface support and not a problem with the dive itself, then a different picture emerges.

R..

I don't think it's reasonable to say this was not a diving accident. I read a DAN statistic somewhere that claimed in most diving accidents, the victim makes it to the surface first. I'll have to see if I can find the article, it's possible I am just crazy.

Let me ask you this. If you do a deep dive and surface and get on the boat. 15 minutes later you've got DCS and the captain is calling coast guard for help. Is that a diving accident?

 

[The Chairman]

There is nothing nefarious here. You and I have a difference of opinion.

That was my point. That and the fact you didn't try to couch it in those terms.

This does not pass the sniff test to me.

I certainly don't have a problem with it. He wasn't there when the accident happened and joined in when others would not. It's like saying an accident attorney can't assist in an accident. I don't buy that.

We both have inside information that we are either unwilling or have been asked to not post. I'm OK with that. Both of us received that info from people with agendas, or at least possible agendas, so both of us should hold to those beliefs with a grain of salt. I'm carrying a fickin' shaker just in case.

 

[Diver0001]

I don't think it's reasonable to say this was not a diving accident. I read a DAN statistic somewhere that claimed in most diving accidents, the victim makes it to the surface first. I'll have to see if I can find the article, it's possible I am just crazy.

Let me ask you this. If you do a deep dive and surface and get on the boat. 15 minutes later you've got DCS and the captain is calling coast guard for help. Is that a diving accident?

Yeah, I recall the article you mean. I was trying to make a point that the procedures on the boat allowed for the diver to fall unconscious and sink without it being noticed. The fact that he fell unconscious obviously wasn't due to faulty procedures.

R..

 

[boulderjohn]

I don't think it's reasonable to say this was not a diving accident. I read a DAN statistic somewhere that claimed in most diving accidents, the victim makes it to the surface first. I'll have to see if I can find the article, it's possible I am just crazy.

Let me ask you this. If you do a deep dive and surface and get on the boat. 15 minutes later you've got DCS and the captain is calling coast guard for help. Is that a diving accident?

I just went through every incident description in a DAN annual report to look at the manner of death because people were trotting out the old statistic that in something like 90% of all scuba deaths, the divdrs still had their weight belts on, the implication being that they would all be alive today if they had simply dumped their weights. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the divers reached the surface. In one case, the diver suffered a heart attack after he got on the dive boat. (And, yes, he still had his weight belt on.) All of these cases were considered to be dive fatalities.

 

[EricTheDood]

What appears to be the tactic here is that the plaintiff wants this handled as a "boating" accident and wants to look at what happend on the boat that allowed one person to pass out and sink without anyone noticing it while at the same time they managed to save another person who was having (possibly) a similar problem.

1. How sure is everyone that Rob Stewart made it to the surface at the end of the last dive?

2. WHO saw him? Does this witness have a history of bad memory? Double vision? Taking any meds?

3. Maybe they were confused and remembered seeing him at the surface from a previous dive?

4. Maybe they were confused and saw Peter Sotis at the surface, in the water, thinking that Sotis was already back on the boat.

Reliable witness testimony will make or break this case. It won't even matter what the boat crew's responsibility was if substantial doubt can be cast on whether Steward ever made it to the surface.

 

[Wookie]

1-100%
2-The Deckhand.
3-Maybe, but Rob did not respond to commands to grab the tag line less than 5 feet from him while he was on the surface.
4-Maybe. Maybe monkeys will fly from someone's butt, but maybe it went down another way.

 

[cathal]

Well... I'm not a lawyer but it seems obvious to me that step 1 in any liability case is going to be to establish who owed whom a duty of care. As I said above, establishing liability in most legal systems requires a causal link from A leads to B leads to C. What you are saying is that the Sotis lawyer intends to undermine A, which would make anything else that happened on the day of accident irrelevant in terms of liability.

Of course the plaintiff's lawyer is going to argue exactly the opposite. They will probably tell the jury that Stewart was a "customer" just like anyone who signs up to dive on a dive boat via a dive operator. What they will tell the jury is that the boat and AH were hired to organize the dive because Stewart wasn't able to do it himself, essentially providing a context similar to any other guided dive done from a boat in Florida. In the American system it's left to the judgment of laymen to decide whose argument they believe more, but the plaintiff will have a great deal of legal precedent to support their argument based on how excursions via boat are "usually" conducted and who is "usually" found to owe a duty of care when things go wrong. That makes the Sotis defense tricky because if his tactic doesn't work he'll be left twisting in the wind with no plan-B. A lot will depend on the letter of the contract(s) that were signed.

Hi
I'm not a lawyer either but I have a small back ground in safety management as a practitioner and I dive a rEvo . The point I'm making is that I'm not arguing an opinion at all. I'm just stating that there is very firm legal doctrine regarding occupational safety and health in most jurisdictions. I know that in mine and most jurisdictions ultimately the employer is responsible when the Contractor messes up because this is to ensure that the Employers hire professional contractors or else you would have every employer hiring the cheapest unqualified safety advisers and then laying the responsibility for when something goes wrong squarely on their shoulders.
So then we have a number of posts on FB from the attorney who is representing AH. They maintain a number of emails do exist that show a contractual arrangement was entered into whereby his client was hired to provide dive guiding services to another company i.e. AH are now employed by that company who are now the Employers.
And then we have the attorney stating that this is the legal avenue they are taking with this case ON FB before the case has even gotten to court. And considering they are now in effect showing the other legal team their hand AND examining the track record of this lawyer one would assume they ultimately must be pretty confident with this particular line of argument. My only view in this is that they are deliberately letting the plaintiff's legal team know that this is their legal defence via FB because at the end of the day it is hard to argue with the law of the land.