Boat passenger recalls crash that killed three

COEUR d’ALENE — Skye Neversorry thought she would die.

She had been sucked underwater and for a time that seemed unsettled, seconds or minutes or longer, she feared she would not rise to the black surface of Lake Coeur d’Alene to fill her gasping lungs with night air.

Neversorry — a passenger in a wake boat that in the dark, moonless evening of July 30, 2016, struck another boat head-on near Stevens Point —was sucked under the lake’s surface as the boat she was in partially submerged before bobbing to the surface.

One of five people in a Mastercraft wake boat that struck a Formula pleasurecraft, Neversorry, 26, testified for almost three hours Thursday in the first day of the trial of Dennis D. Magner, 52, a former Spokane ad executive who is charged with three counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Neversorry told jurors Thursday that she and her boyfriend, Jonathan Colin Sweat, and two acquaintances, Alex Gutierrez and Paige Archer, visited Magner at his Driftwood Point property for a barbecue; and that only she and Archer drank excessively, sharing three bottles of peach vodka.

Magner had one beer, Neversorry said, and the others did not drink before going on the boat ride on a whitecap-covered Lake Coeur d’Alene that culminated in the crash and the deaths of Caitlin Breeze, 21, of Spokane; Justin Luhr, 34, of Medical Lake, and Justin Honken, 31, of Post Falls.

The entourage first motored south from Driftwood Point to the Carlin Bay Resort around 7:45 p.m., where they found the kitchen was closing, but bartenders made a derailer for them and two other acquaintances they met at the resort north of Harrison.

The bucket drink that mixed a variety of alcohol with fruit juices was shared by seven.

When the resort closed, the group wasn’t allowed to stay on the premises to finish the drink, Neversorry said, so they took the derailer, which was full, as they headed north in the wake boat in the waning daylight.

A cellphone call from the two other boaters asking for help prompted them to motor north past Driftwood Point to the end of the channel west of Arrow Point, across from Coeur d’Alene.

By then it was dark, and they were told they needn’t respond to the call for help. All was OK.

So the party of five in the Mastercraft wake boat, with Magner behind the wheel, turned around in the moonless night, in a lake heavy with waves. They followed the west side of the channel back toward Driftwood Point.

Property owners on both sides of the channel that is about a half-mile wide, watched them pass, motoring about 20 mph, their navigational lights bobbing, as the wake boat cut through the waves.

Neversorry had moved from the back of the boat to the passenger seat because the wind blew her hair into her false eyelashes, and she was afraid her eyelashes would be pulled off.

“The glue was coming undone,” she said.

Sweat stood between her and Magner, who was behind the wheel. Gutierrez and Archer were in the back of the boat “necking,” she said.

Magner pointed left across the bow explaining to Sweat how he navigated at night using shore lights.

That is when the world stopped, Neversorry said.

“He was just pointing,” she said.

And then she was underwater.

“It didn’t feel cold or anything,” she said. “I just thought I was dead.”

She felt a stinging sensation, and when she emerged, there was silence.

Just waves and sloshing and otherwise silence.

They had struck something, but she didn’t know what. Rocks, maybe, certainly not a boat.

“Bun, are you OK?” Sweat asked, using her nickname “Are you with me?”

Magner was unconscious, she said, blood was pouring from his head.

“Everytime his heart beat, blood would spray out of his head,” she said.

When she turned, she saw that Gutierrez and Archer were no longer in the boat.

She screamed. She called for them, and then heard Gutierrez yell his arms seemed broken and that he was holding Archer. The couple bobbed in the water 30 feet from the crash site. Neversorry passed life jackets to Sweat, who feared the boat was sinking. She threw a life-saving device to Gutierrez, who swam Archer back to the wrecked Mastercraft.

Neversorry, who suffered a concussion in the crash, was still uncertain what had happened, she told jurors Thursday, and then she saw pieces of the other boat, floating in the waves.

As Magner lay unconscious, Sweat took the boat’s wheel and began motoring in a circle through the wreckage calling for survivors, she said.

Neversorry sat in the back of the boat calming Archer who “was in full-blown shock,” she said.”She was bleeding all over me,” from two cuts on her head.

“Colin kept hollering, ‘is anybody out there,’” she said. “I realized the pieces in the water was a boat.”

Sweat motored in circles in the night through the waves looking for survivors as others arrived by boat to help.

“We were going in circles, trying to see if anybody, or anything was out there,” she said.