JURORS yesterday heard the dramatic final moments before the Commodore Goodwill ploughed into L’Ecume II, killing three fishermen – with the horn being blasted just four or five seconds before the fatal collision.
Audio from the ship’s bridge played in the courtroom captured alarms sounding for up to 10 minutes before the early-hours crash on 8 December, followed by Artur Sevash-Zade asking, “Is this f***ing guy sleeping?” just moments before the trawler was struck.
Mr Sevash-Zade (35) is standing trial alongside Lewis Carr (30), and both have pleaded not guilty to three manslaughter charges in relation to the deaths of skipper Michael Michieli and crew members Larry Ladion Simyunn and Jervis Ramirez Baligat.
If the jury find one or both of the defendants not guilty of the manslaughter charges, they can consider an alternative lesser charge of endangering others at sea.
Crown Advocate Matthew Maletroit, prosecuting, opened the trial on Monday, and continued his opening arguments into Tuesday afternoon.
Having argued that there had been a “litany” of failings in the two bridge crew members’ actions – including failing to communicate, maintain a proper watch, or avoid the collision – he guided jurors yesterday through a timeline of the final moments before the collision, using audio recordings taken onboard the Goodwill, screenshots taken from the ferry’s two radars, and a map with a reconstruction of the two ships’ itineraries.
The audio, he argued, showed how Mr Carr and Mr Sevash-Zade were busying themselves with “non-urgent” tasks.
At 5.14am and 5.15am, L’Ecume first became visible on the Goodwill’s radars, he said.
At 5.25am, collision warnings started appearing on one radar, and the other radar’s different setting meant its collision warnings appeared from 5.28am. The collision happened at 5.35am.
The screens also showed how the crew had made changes to their settings at 5.23am, 5.25am, and 5.29 or 5.30am. This meant that one of the two defendants had been attending the systems and looked at the screens at those times, the advocate said.
The microphones picked up on Mr Sevash-Zade spotting the trawler and saying: “Is this f***ing guy sleeping?” before sounding the horn eight times. Seconds later, the impact could be heard.
A last-minute attempt to change the course of the Goodwill was “too little, too late”, he said. The ferry was on autopilot at the time, and the trawler was “only a few hundred metres away”.
“We know Goodwill crashed into the starboard side of L’Ecume II at full speed and L’Ecume II suffered catastrophic damage and sank immediately,” he said.
He further claimed that Mr Carr had been doing paperwork and completing logbook entries – claiming he had already passed Corbière waypoint before the collision had even happened – instead of keeping a proper watch.
And he contrasted what he described as a lack of communication between Mr Carr and Mr Sevash-Zade with audio minutes after the collision, when the ship’s captain came back onto the bridge and could be heard speaking on the microphones.
After the collision, it took several minutes for Mr Carr to call Jersey Coastguard, the court heard.
It was the captain who started the man-overboard procedure, the court heard.
The advocate took jurors through a number of different professional codes and standards, which repeatedly stressed the importance of bridge crews to work as a team, communicate well, and keep a proper lookout.
Both defendants were experienced and trained, he said, adding: “They would have learned those principles and they were assessed on them.”
The guidance also warned crews not to use AIS systems as the basis for navigational decisions.
The advocate said L’Ecume II had suffered “catastrophic” damage before sinking, with several parts of the boat breaking off completely.
The bodies of Mr Simyunn and Mr Baligat were only recovered from the seabed later, after rescue agencies and local fishing boats staged a rescue effort and a recovery effort. Mr Michieli’s body was recovered from the interior of the boat in April 2023.
A postmortem concluded that all three had drowned, the court heard.
The jury trial is due to continue for a month. Commissioner Sir John Saunders is presiding.
