Mother of boat crash victim testifies

Almost two years ago, on July 30, 2016, three people died and disappeared into the darkness of Lake Coeur d’Alene after their boat, floating in choppy water in the twilight, was struck by another boat.

Immediately after the crash, pieces of both boats floated in the wavy lake, accompanied by an eerie silence.

The ghost boat appeared to have drifted free of its moorings and floated quietly and without navigation lights, into the lake’s well-traveled channel south of Stevens Point where it was hit head-on by a southbound vessel operated by former Spokane advertising executive Dennis D. Magner.

There appeared to be no victims in the ghost boat, a Formula pleasure craft, that was struck by Magner’s Mastercraft ski boat.

It wasn’t known at the time that Caitlin Breeze, 21, of Spokane; Justin Luhr, 34, of Medical Lake; and Justin Honken, 31, of Post Falls had been in the Formula, and now they were gone, their crushed bodies sinking into a dark lake.

The silence that followed the loud crash heard on both sides of the lake was pierced seconds later by screams for help, and eventually engine sounds from the boats of neighbors.

Their questioning voices mixed with the shocked replies of the survivors in the Mastercraft, and surrounded the wreckage.

On the second day of Dennis D. Magner’s manslaughter trial in Coeur d’Alene’s First District Court for his role in the deaths of Breeze, Luhr and Honken, it was still unclear why the three victims were in a boat, in the channel, in the dark, without navigational lights.

What was clear, according to Friday’s testimony, was that neighbors on both sides of the lake did not see the victims, or their boat, which may have been under power. It was clear from previous testimony that the five people in the Mastercraft had seen neither them nor their boat.

Jessica Breeze, Caitlin’s mother, who took the witness stand Friday, told the jury her daughter was adventuresome. Caitlin was a Gonzaga college student who worked for the summer at Clinkerdagger — the Spokane steakhouse where her mother also worked. Caitlin and her mom were close friends.

“We did everything together,” Jessica Breeze said.

Mom and daughter were with two friends when they met Honken and Luhr a couple days earlier at downtown Spokane’s Zola lounge.

“These two cowboys approached us,” Jessica said. “They were wearing hats from Laramie, Wyo. We made a connection”

The Breezes, their two friends and the two cowboys chatted for 45 minutes and Honken and Luhr informally invited the others to join them on a boat ride that weekend.

Jessica did not know her daughter had accepted the two men’s invitation.

“She was an adventuresome 21-year-old,” she said.

If the sequence of events leading to the crash around 9:15 p.m. on a moonless evening, were unclear, the result of the wreck, in its aftermath, became dully irrefutable.

“The whole top of the cuddy was ripped off,” said Trevor Evans, who arrived at the crash scene after hearing the bang from a dock at Echo Bay.

After checking with the five survivors in Magner’s Mastercraft ski boat, he and two others in his boat began picking up debris that floated on the choppy water.

They used flashlights but saw no one from the Formula boat.

The bodies of Honken, Breeze and Luhr were found days later by divers.

Sally Aiken, forensic pathologist with the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office, which performed the autopsies, said the blunt force trauma suffered by all three of the victims had been so forceful as to sever vertebrae and in one case, dislodge the skull from the spinal cord.

Aiken, with the aid of photographs and under direction of Kootenai County Prosecutor Barry McHugh, outlined for jurors the extent of each victim’s injuries: lacerated kidneys and spleens, severed vertebrae, punctured glass wounds, abrasions, rib fractures, tears in the heart, blood in the abdominal cavity.

The blood in Luhr’s ear canals were the result of injuries at the base of his skull, Aiken said.

The fracture was called a hinge fracture that extended from ear to ear.

Honken’s injuries were similar. Glass was embedded in his neck and abdomen. His head was dislocated from his spine.

Breeze suffered from fractured ribs, internal injuries including a severed spine and aorta.

The lungs of all three victims showed signs of breathing before their bodies, incapacitated by the extent of their injuries, sank to the bottom of the lake.

“The combination of the wounds would have been fatal,” Aiken said. “Many of the individual wounds would have been fatal.”

But there was a few seconds of breathing, indicated by the water in the lungs, or foam — water mixing with air — in the lungs as the bodies sank. Therefore, she wrote in her report that the cause of death was, “Drowning due to incapacitation due to blunt force trauma.”

Magner is charged with three counts of involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence.

The third day of testimony in the jury trial that is expected to last three weeks will begin at 9 a.m. Monday at the Justice Building at 324 W. Garden Way.