Death in the dark: How a training exercise turned deadly

Tango 2 bounced atop the choppy waters of the James River on a misty, moonless night. Seaman Freddie Porter Jr. stood watch at the bow, holding on tight, as the inflatable boat bumped along at about 25 knots.

This was a test run for students desiring to be coxswains for the elite Navy SEALs. Porter wanted to be a SEAL one day and figured this was the way to climb that ladder.

The 19-year-old from New Jersey didn't see much ahead except for a far-off white light. Another student stood at the stern. At the wheel: their trainer, an inexperienced driver.

As they made the long turn around Jamestown heading back to Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, they stopped to figure out what that white light was.

They drifted in the middle of Goose Hill Channel, turning sideways. They talked for maybe five minutes. Then, a wall of steel appeared out of nowhere and plowed them over. It was the lead barge in a flotilla.

Porter was chopped to death by the propellers of the tug pushing the barges. His two mates survived, one just barely.

In the two years since the incident, Porter's mother has sought answers. She finally got them this month in U.S. District Court, where a judge awarded Porter's estate $1.25 million, holding the Navy largely responsible for the accident.

Interviews, court records and testimony reveal publicly for the first time the tragic circumstances that led to Porter's death.

Capt. Rondy Wooldridge has been up and down the James River thousands of times. He's been on the water since he was 5 or 6, when his dad first took him out fishing.

Wooldridge holds a 200-ton master's license with radar proficiency. He's worked professionally on the river for 35 or 36 years and had never had a collision.

That streak ended Oct. 11, 2007, when he was at the helm of the William E. Poole, a tug well-known along the James.

He left Campostella at about 4:40 p.m. that day pushing six barges. He stopped at Hog Island, west of the James River Bridge, to pick up two more before heading for Richmond. His flotilla was now about 600 feet long - roughly the size of two football fields laid end to end.

Wooldridge had turned on his lights: red and green on either side of the forward barge with a flashing amber in the middle. And he kept a spotlight pointed at the front corner of the first barge.

The barges were empty, so they sat high above the water line. He quietly shoved off from Hog Island about 10 p.m., reaching a top speed of 7 to 8 mph. As he snaked the flotilla around the S-turn at Hog Island and Jamestown, he recalled seeing three "G.I. Joe boats" speeding past, outside the channel.

Wooldridge never saw the other two rigid hull inflatable boats, or RHIBs, right in front of him.

Chief Petty Officer Elias P. Kfoury of the Special Warfare Development Group had two students in his RHIB as they passed the flotilla in step with the other two RHIBs leading the way.

As Kfoury passed about 100 yards from the barges, he said, he became blinded and disoriented by the tug's spotlight as it swept across the river. He recalled seeing the colored navigational lights on the front barge only as he passed parallel to the flotilla. Others in the front three RHIBs did not see the colored lights.

Tango 2 had lagged behind the others because the crew members were trying to be more cautious.

Petty Officer Julio Rodriguez-Vargas, in charge of the exercise, stayed back with Tango 2 aboard his RHIB, designated Sierra Bravo. He heard the radio chatter from the three RHIBs ahead warning of the barge flotilla. At first he thought it was a pier.

"Look out - there's a barge coming," Rodriguez-Vargas shouted into the radio before his RHIB sped out of the way, just missing the flotilla.

Tango 2's driver, Petty Officer 1st Class Esteban Angeles, never heard the warning.

He did see the spotlight and thought "the light was pretty far out," but unlike Kfoury, Angeles thought the light was stationary and assumed it was a vessel. None of the three men on Tango 2 saw the barges in front of the white light, nor did they see the red, amber and green lights at the front of the forward barge.

Chief Albert Bollinger, standing at the stern of Tango 2, was the first to see the forward barge's hull appear out of the darkness.

"Oh s---! Oh s---!" he shouted.

"At that point, I just saw a steel wall," Angeles said.

Bollinger jumped off the back of the RHIB and swam to relative safety in the 60-degree water.

Angeles jumped as well but got sucked under by the pull of the barge's undercurrent.

It's not known whether Porter jumped or fell off. No one on the boat recalled him saying anything.

"I tried to swim down, but my life jacket kept pulling me back up under the barge," Angeles said.

With his emergency light on, Angeles could see the rust on the bottom of the barge as he was swept under. He began hearing a "whooshing" sound and knew he was being pulled toward propellers.

Angeles figured he was under about two minutes. Then he began sucking water.

"I pretty much couldn't hold my breath anymore," he said.

Angeles said his life flashed before his eyes. "I thought that was it. This is my fate."

Suddenly his head popped up above water. He blew his safety whistle. Rodriguez-Vargas heard the signal and rescued Angeles.

But they couldn't find Porter - just his light.

Porter's body was discovered the next day. He had been swept under the same way as Angeles, toward the propeller. Wooldridge, the tug's captain, didn't know he had hit anything, so the tug's 3-1/2-foot blades continued whirling away.

The spinning propeller severed Porter's right foot, then fractured his left leg and scraped his body a couple more times before plunging into his chest, severing his backbone. The fatal blow came when a blade struck the left side of his head.

Dr. Kevin Whaley, the state's assistant chief medical examiner, said Porter's lungs were dry, indicating he had managed to hold his breath until the blow to his head.

The positioning of Porter's arms indicated to Whaley that he had tried mightily to pull himself away from the propeller.

A year later, the lawsuits followed.

Vulcan Materials Co., the Alabama-based owner of the Poole, filed first, asking the U.S. District Court to exonerate the tug from any liability.

Porter's mother, Cassita Massiah, filed an $8 million claim against the Poole on behalf of her son's estate. Vulcan then sued the U.S. government, blaming the Navy for the accident, and the government filed a counterclaim against Vulcan.

The case played out this month before U.S. District Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr.; Massiah sat through it each day.

Massiah's attorneys, Daniel O. Rose from New York and Norfolk's Michael F. Imprevento, tried to show that the accident was largely the Poole's fault.

They solicited testimony from Capt. Larry Gravely, a manager at Vulcan, who testified that the company has no written policies on posting lookouts, no training on how to assess risks of collision, no procedures on the use of radar or the horn, and no training on speed.

Ship captains rely on the maritime industry's so-called "Rules of the Road" manual and Coast Guard training.

"Did anyone from Vulcan assess this accident?" Rose asked him.

"We don't know what happened," Gravely said.

Massiah's expert witness, Mitchell Stoller, a California-based maritime industry professional with more than 40 years of experience, testified that the navigational lights were set too far back on the forward barge, that the captain used the spotlight inappropriately, and that he failed to post a lookout at the forward barge on such a dark night.

Vulcan's attorneys fought hard to keep Stoller out of the case, arguing that he is "unreliable" and unqualified to render opinions about tug operations. Morgan disagreed.

The tug, Stoller said, was in violation of "good seamanship."

But Vulcan had its own experts, who testified otherwise.

Capt. Raymond G. Robbins, a tug captain with nearly 50 years of experience, said the tug's navigational lights were "proper that night." As for a lookout, Robbins said placing a deckhand on the forward barge is necessary only when there is fog.

Vulcan also called Master Chief Petty Officer Richard W. Cederman, a special warfare trainer, who said students are warned to stay in the right side of the channel and not to stop in a channel unless there is "an extreme emergency."

And on this night, the sailors in Tango 2 should have been using their radar and radios.

Vulcan also called Wooldridge and his deckhand, Joseph B. Christensen.

Christensen said that in his experience he can see better from the wheelhouse than from down on the forward barge. He also said he placed the navigational lights on top of cargo boxes instead of at the very front of the first barge to avoid injury to himself.

"If you put them all the way forward, they could fall off, or I could fall off," he said. "That could be unsafe for me. That's why I didn't do it."

Wooldridge testified that he did not see the two RHIBs in front of him with his eyes or on the radar. With choppy waters that night, the radar is susceptible to picking up "clutter."

On cross-examination by Rose, Wooldridge said he didn't need a forward lookout because visibility was fine.

"But you didn't see the boat that you hit?" Rose asked.

"No, I did not," Wooldridge replied. "They should have seen me."

Wooldridge didn't learn of the fatal accident until the next day, after he had reached the Richmond area.

On Nov. 6, at the end of the four-day, non-jury trial, Morgan found that the Navy was 80 percent liable for the accident and the Poole 20 percent.

While Vulcan "turned a blind eye" by having no procedures, training or guidelines for barge flotillas, "the people on Tango 2 didn't know what they were doing," the judge said.

Michael W. Kerns, a Justice Department attorney representing the government and the Navy, couldn't argue the point.

"We acknowledge fault on the part of the crew operating the boat," he told the judge.

The judge found that while the Poole should have had a forward lookout that night, Tango 2 was largely responsible for stopping in front of the flotilla. Training issues were paramount in his decision.

A formal written opinion will be issued soon.

But the case is far from over. Vulcan and the government are jointly responsible for the $1.25 million that Morgan awarded to Porter's estate.

The government and the Navy will return to court seeking immunity from paying damages. If they win, Vulcan will be responsible for paying the entire award.

For Porter's mother, the decision does little to ease her two years of grieving. Her son, one of seven children, was loving and charming, always the life of the party, she said.

But the case did provide many sought-after answers that the Navy had not shared with her. She had simply been told it was an unfortunate accident.

"I have to hold people accountable for their mistakes," she said. "This could have been avoided. All I wanted was the truth.

"Now I have justice for my son."

Tim McGlone, (757) 446-2343, tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com