Suit filed in death of diver killed while cleaning boat in N. Palm

WEST PALM BEACH — One minute, Luis Gorgonio-Ixba was routinely cleaning the hull of a yacht at Old Port Cove Marina in North Palm Beach.

The next minute, with the errant flip of a switch, the 34-yearold West Palm Beach man was sucked into the 164-foot yacht’s powerful engines. He died from blows to the head.

In a lawsuit filed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court on Wednesday, an attorney representing Gorgonio-Ixba’s four children accuses the company that employed the young father, the marina and the yacht owner of negligence in the June 2017 death.

“This tragedy is one that was easily avoidable,” said attorney John Caracuzzo, who filed what he called a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on behalf of Gorgonio-Ixba’s family. In the lawsuit, Caracuzzo points to a cascade of errors that led to Gorgonio-Ixba’s death.

Caracuzzo said those errors include officials at the marina and Gorgonio-Ixba’s bosses at Eastern Marine Services failing to alert the crew of the Honey that Gorgonio-Ixba was coming to clean the yacht. And he added the crew of the boat, owned by the Delaware-based Brizo LLC, did not look in the water before activating the bow thrusters.

“A simple call to Eastern Marine or a brief check of the water would have prevented this,” Caracuzzo said. In addition, Gorgonio-Ixba left a scuba tank on the dock, a standard way of alerting boaters that a diver is in the water cleaning the hull, he said.

Instead of looking for signs that a diver was beneath the Westport yacht, a crew member of the Honey activated the propellers at the front of the boat to move it closer to the dock so jet skis and other equipment could be brought aboard for a planned trip to the Bahamas, Caracuzzo said.

As a result, he said, Gorgonio-Ixba’s four children, ranging in age from 1 to 15, were left without a father. Rosalia Gorgonio-Ixba lost her son. Urieli Ramirez Carbajal, who is the mother of Gorgonio-Ixba’s two youngest children, can’t seek damages for herself because even though they were partners for 10 years, the couple wasn’t married.

Officials from the marina, Eastern Marine Services and Brizo weren’t immediately available for comment.

After last year’s accident, Old Port Cove Marina issued a statement. In it, the company offered “condolences to the family and friends of the diver and our help to the owner, captain and crew of the vessel involved.”