ITALY— Autopsies show that four of the seven people who died when the Bayesian superyacht sank last month off the coast of Sicily did so because they were stuck inside the ship’s cabins while they were still alive and couldn’t breathe.
According to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Jonathan Bloomer, who was in charge of Morgan Stanley’s investment banking business in London, and his wife Judy, as well as Chris Morvillo, a lawyer in New York City, and his wife Neda, all died of “death by confinement.”
However, the so-called “dry drowning” event supports the idea that the four were awake when the ship sank and were desperately breathing in a small bubble of oxygen until it ran out. The Palermo Institute of Forensic Medicine did tests on them and found that they did not have any water in their lungs, airways, or stomach.
Death by drowning
Neda and Chris Morvillo were seen together in New York City in 2018. Autopsies show that the couple drowned when the Bayesian ship sank last month off the coast of southern Italy. Four people were found dead in a cabin on the port (left) side of the hull. They were with software entrepreneur Mike Lynch, who had planned the boat trip to celebrate a recent court win.
Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah was found in the next cabin, which was also on the port side of the ship. La Repubblica says Lynch’s wife tried to save her husband and daughter, but she cut her feet on the glass and fell to the bottom of the boat as it shook.
Unreasonable errors
The AP says that Morvillo was one of Lynch’s U.S. lawyers in a fraud case involving the 2011 sale of search engine startup Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. People said Lynch had lied about the books to make Autonomy seem more valuable than it really was, so the deal fell through. In June, he was found not guilty.
It is thought that prosecutors are looking into the chance that the captain and two crew members had something to do with what happened. There is still no known reason why the ship sank.
Giovanni Costantino, the CEO of the company that built the yacht, said that the crew made a series of “indescribable, unreasonable errors” that caused the ship to sink.