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Omission raises eyebrows, but dive death case remains in limbo | KeysNews.com
Omission raises eyebrows, but dive death case remains in limbo
BY ROBERT SILK Free Press Staff
rsilk@keysnews.com
PLANTATION KEY -- An omission under oath by the lone suspect in a mysterious 2008 diving death off Key Largo could give local authorities a new matter to mull over.
Meanwhile, a second written analysis into the death of Joanne Page, this one conducted by the U.S. Navy's point man on dive-related fatalities, has backed up the conclusion of Monroe County Medical Examiner E. Hunt Scheuerman that her death was suspicious, though not conclusively a homicide.
Authorities have investigated Eugene "E.B." Jackson, a hotel builder from Salisbury, N.C., for a potential role in the death of Page on Oct. 30, 2008. He was the only person in the presence of his girlfriend when she died after the couple got separated from their dive boat during a chartered excursion to French Reef.
The death of the 51-year-old mother of two, which seemed fairly ordinary at first, piqued the interest of law enforcement agencies after an autopsy revealed that Page had a series of neck injuries consistent with strangulation. Though Scheuerman eventually ruled the cause of death to be undetermined, he still harbors suspicions about the case. In April he told the Free Press that had Page died on land, he definitely would have ruled it a homicide.
Another area of intrigue: after Page's body was returned to land that day, investigators noticed the valve on her dive tank was closed -- an action that both men who assisted in pulling Page from the water say they did not take, records show.
In an Oct. 21 deposition from a civil case spawned by Page's death, an omission by Jackson has raised eyebrows.
Asked by an attorney for an opposing side in the case to describe his fatal dive with Page, Jackson detailed a relatively mundane excursion along the reef in which they surfaced only at its conclusion.
"And when we came up out of the water we were on the opposite side of the boat that we went in," he said.
The account is consistent with what Jackson has told investigators all along; that he and Page had surfaced from the dive on the down current side of the boat and hadn't been able to reach the vessel against rough seas. While swimming, Jackson maintains, he turned around and noticed Page was floating on her back. He then tried in vain to save his lover.
But Jackson's account of the dive is not consistent with information from the dive computers he and Page wore that day, which was released to opposing parties in the civil case after the deposition.
The computer logs show that 14 minutes into the 22-minute, 40-foot dive, Jackson surfaced briefly before going back down. Page, meanwhile, followed him up from the bottom, but remained 11 feet under the surface.
On its face, such a move isn't unusual. Divers are routinely advised to surface and check their position relative to their boat midway through a shallow-water descent, said Rob Bleser, owner of Quiescence Diving Services in Key Largo.
But Mark Hruska, the attorney who was deposing Jackson and defending dive concessionaire It's A Dive in the civil suit, is curious how Jackson could have forgotten about such a boat check, especially since it likely would have revealed that they were already on the wrong side of the boat and, therefore, in some peril.
When rescuers eventually found the couple an estimated hour after they surfaced for good, they were ¬½- to ¾-mile from the dive boat, according to testimony.
"More than likely, for them to be found as far away as they were found, you almost had to start in the wrong direction and continue in the wrong direction," dive shop owner Bleser said.
Hruska says the revelation that Jackson surfaced, combined with his omission under oath, has led him to wonder what the North Carolina builder was really looking for.
"If you're down current, you would signal crazily," he said. "The other way you could argue is that he went back up to see that nobody was around and did what he did."
In an interview last week, State Attorney Dennis Ward said that Jackson's failure to tell of his mid-dive surfacing could potentially be used by prosecutors as evidence of a guilty mind-set. But he cautioned that the issue alone doesn't materially change the case against Jackson.
"When you take it all into context, yeah, it could be an omission that could have some meaning down the road," he said. "Is it going to break the case wide open where we have a better case to go forward? I don't think so."
Ward said he still needs investigators to unearth more information about a possible motive in the case.
More investigation is exactly what Capt. James Caruso, the Navy's dive-related fatalities expert, said is needed if the case Medical Examiner's Office is ever going to be able to reclassify Page's death from an undetermined one to a homicide.
"[T]his is a suspicious death and the circumstances and autopsy findings are inconsistent," he wrote in his September 2010 review. "Therefore, the best classification for manner of death is undetermined until additional investigative information is available to classify it otherwise."
Jackson declined to comment for this story and his attorney, Lawrance Craig of Miami, didn't respond to phone calls from the Free Press.
Omission raises eyebrows, but dive death case remains in limbo
BY ROBERT SILK Free Press Staff
rsilk@keysnews.com
PLANTATION KEY -- An omission under oath by the lone suspect in a mysterious 2008 diving death off Key Largo could give local authorities a new matter to mull over.
Meanwhile, a second written analysis into the death of Joanne Page, this one conducted by the U.S. Navy's point man on dive-related fatalities, has backed up the conclusion of Monroe County Medical Examiner E. Hunt Scheuerman that her death was suspicious, though not conclusively a homicide.
Authorities have investigated Eugene "E.B." Jackson, a hotel builder from Salisbury, N.C., for a potential role in the death of Page on Oct. 30, 2008. He was the only person in the presence of his girlfriend when she died after the couple got separated from their dive boat during a chartered excursion to French Reef.
The death of the 51-year-old mother of two, which seemed fairly ordinary at first, piqued the interest of law enforcement agencies after an autopsy revealed that Page had a series of neck injuries consistent with strangulation. Though Scheuerman eventually ruled the cause of death to be undetermined, he still harbors suspicions about the case. In April he told the Free Press that had Page died on land, he definitely would have ruled it a homicide.
Another area of intrigue: after Page's body was returned to land that day, investigators noticed the valve on her dive tank was closed -- an action that both men who assisted in pulling Page from the water say they did not take, records show.
In an Oct. 21 deposition from a civil case spawned by Page's death, an omission by Jackson has raised eyebrows.
Asked by an attorney for an opposing side in the case to describe his fatal dive with Page, Jackson detailed a relatively mundane excursion along the reef in which they surfaced only at its conclusion.
"And when we came up out of the water we were on the opposite side of the boat that we went in," he said.
The account is consistent with what Jackson has told investigators all along; that he and Page had surfaced from the dive on the down current side of the boat and hadn't been able to reach the vessel against rough seas. While swimming, Jackson maintains, he turned around and noticed Page was floating on her back. He then tried in vain to save his lover.
But Jackson's account of the dive is not consistent with information from the dive computers he and Page wore that day, which was released to opposing parties in the civil case after the deposition.
The computer logs show that 14 minutes into the 22-minute, 40-foot dive, Jackson surfaced briefly before going back down. Page, meanwhile, followed him up from the bottom, but remained 11 feet under the surface.
On its face, such a move isn't unusual. Divers are routinely advised to surface and check their position relative to their boat midway through a shallow-water descent, said Rob Bleser, owner of Quiescence Diving Services in Key Largo.
But Mark Hruska, the attorney who was deposing Jackson and defending dive concessionaire It's A Dive in the civil suit, is curious how Jackson could have forgotten about such a boat check, especially since it likely would have revealed that they were already on the wrong side of the boat and, therefore, in some peril.
When rescuers eventually found the couple an estimated hour after they surfaced for good, they were ¬½- to ¾-mile from the dive boat, according to testimony.
"More than likely, for them to be found as far away as they were found, you almost had to start in the wrong direction and continue in the wrong direction," dive shop owner Bleser said.
Hruska says the revelation that Jackson surfaced, combined with his omission under oath, has led him to wonder what the North Carolina builder was really looking for.
"If you're down current, you would signal crazily," he said. "The other way you could argue is that he went back up to see that nobody was around and did what he did."
In an interview last week, State Attorney Dennis Ward said that Jackson's failure to tell of his mid-dive surfacing could potentially be used by prosecutors as evidence of a guilty mind-set. But he cautioned that the issue alone doesn't materially change the case against Jackson.
"When you take it all into context, yeah, it could be an omission that could have some meaning down the road," he said. "Is it going to break the case wide open where we have a better case to go forward? I don't think so."
Ward said he still needs investigators to unearth more information about a possible motive in the case.
More investigation is exactly what Capt. James Caruso, the Navy's dive-related fatalities expert, said is needed if the case Medical Examiner's Office is ever going to be able to reclassify Page's death from an undetermined one to a homicide.
"[T]his is a suspicious death and the circumstances and autopsy findings are inconsistent," he wrote in his September 2010 review. "Therefore, the best classification for manner of death is undetermined until additional investigative information is available to classify it otherwise."
Jackson declined to comment for this story and his attorney, Lawrance Craig of Miami, didn't respond to phone calls from the Free Press.
