Suit filed in case of "Girl dead, boy injured at Glacier National Park
- Thread starter Jim Lapenta
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
So, Esprise Me or some other attorney, what would that take? What would make it criminal?
Once again, whatever weight you use for your diving, especially with a drysuit, is irrelevant to this situation. She had no inflator, so her drysuit was less buoyant than a wetsuit. At the greatest depths, it would have squeezed her so badly that she was probably less buoyant than going with nor suit at all.
From a physics point of view, that doesn't make sense.
Why? I am suggesting that her body was squeezed to a smaller volume than the was at the surface. It can happen.
I'll repeat what you said:
Her dry suit still had some, but very little air. That would result in displacement of water where the mass of the trapped air would be much less than water. The fabric of the drysuit, regardless of its material is going to be less than that of water. Her body would not compress any differently while wearing a dry suit than when not. Her bones won't compress. Muscle is mostly water, and she looked to be rather lean.
For non-drysuit divers, it gives them some sort of an idea just how badly overweighted Linnea was. They have no frame of reference if they dive tropical and need much less weight.
Typically, law enforcement investigates and makes a recommendation to the district attorney, who has discretion to decide whether to file charges. As @Marie13 points out, the coroner found it to be an accidental death based in part on statements made by the instructor. Perhaps the information that comes out of this civil suit will prompt them to reopen the investigation.
ETA: I wonder how many scuba deaths the county coroner there has investigated. Probably not many. The LA County Coroner investigates several every year, and Capt. John Kades gives an entertaining and informative presentation at the annual Long Beach Scuba Show. I doubt he would have missed the significance of such details as the lack of an inflator hose or 44 lbs. of unditchable weight on a girl who probably needed half that.
But she couldn't power up against 44 pounds -- if she had 10 pounds of weight, inflating her BCD, finning and the rescuer's inflated BCD, surely that would make a difference, yes?
But really the reason I was surprised to hear "44 pounds" is how did an instructor think "yeah, that sounds normal, let's dive".
