How a California boat trip turned into a deadly crash

Staff Writer

Aug. 8, 2024 Updated 12:01 PM PT

Interviews with survivors paint a terrifying scene as the boat hit the jetty.
It marks a rare fatal accident in the marina. Investigators are seeking cause.

The summer sun had set, and it was dark on the waters of Alamitos Bay when 12 friends aboard the 48-foot Four Kings sportfishing boat arrived back at harbor after a day of cruising, eating and drinking around the Long Beach coast.

Then, the passengers — half of whom were on the control deck while half were in a room below — felt a massive jolt.

The people below were knocked down, thrown forward and dazed, but one man was able to gather himself and go up to the flybridge to survey the damage.

He emerged to a horrific scene. There was blood everywhere and bodies not moving splayed out on the ground.

And it was about to get worse. The boat had hit the jetty, was taking on water and was drifting back out to sea. So he acted.

That’s how one of the biggest maritime emergencies in years began in Long Beach’s harbor, a hot spot for pleasure boating. The July 3 crash injured nearly everyone on board and killed John Correa, a former UC Berkeley baseball player who worked in real estate. He also volunteered as a coach for Millikan High School in Long Beach, where he helped lead the team to a 1983 state championship in its division.

The incident is now under investigation by the Long Beach Fire Department’s Marine Safety Division, which has released few details other than to say speed was probably a factor. There have been no arrests made or charges.

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But how could the boat, piloted most of the evening by an experienced boater, have slammed into the jetty just outside the slip at such a high speed? Those waters are navigated by hundreds every day in a city where 4,000 pleasure boats are docked at marinas.

A map showing the Four Kings boat path leaving the Alamitos Bay and crashing on the peninsula.

“Fatalities are extremely low frequency. I can’t remember the last time we had a fatality on a recreational boat,” said Gonzalo Medina, the marine safety chief of the Long Beach Fire Department.

The last fatal crash on the water was in 2021, Medina said, when a racer going more than 100 mph flipped his boat during the Long Beach Sprint Nationals.

Whatever caused the crash is still a mystery. But passengers on the boat described to The Times how the evening turned from a calm, pleasant cruise to a bloody nightmare that could have claimed even more lives if it weren’t for the quick thinking of a few people on board.

One of the owners of the boat, Kevin King, who was captaining the ship that night, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times reached out to the other 10 survivors as well; three shared their recollections while the rest did not respond.

Attempts to reach Correa’s family, who have started a GoFundMe page for the Millikan baseball program in his honor, were also unsuccessful.

A photo shows the sinking Four Kings boat in the Long Beach harbor.

King, the owner of the Four Kings, knew the waters around Long Beach well, said the three people who were on the boat and spoke with The Times.

He is an experienced boater and knows his boat like “the back of his hand,” said Barry Vince, one of the passengers.

“He’s been out on that ocean, on that jetty thousands of times,” Vince said. “I had full confidence in him.”

Two weeks before he got on the Four Kings boat with his wife, Erin Earlywine, Vince nearly died. The ultramarathon runner was taking part in a race in the Pyrenees in Andorra when he fell and rolled down part of a mountain. He broke three ribs and dislocated his shoulder.

“I was so grateful to live through that,” Vince said. “Then to have this happen right after is trippy.”

Vince and Earlywine had no plans to be out late. Vince is sober, and Earlywine had an early cycling event in the morning.

“Kevin assured us we’d be home right when sun is going down,” said Earlywine.

But they weren’t.

After leaving Alamitos Bay, the boat cruised past White Island, where the 12 friends were unable to get a mooring to sit and eat. King steered them on to Shoreline Village, then went out past the breakwater. Then they came back in and floated and ate and drank, according to the people who were on the boat.

“Sunset came. It was getting dark so we headed back,” Vince said.

At that point, the group of 12 split into two. One group of six remained in the upper level where the boat’s controls are. The other six hung out below in the interior room, which has no front-facing windows.

Down below, the group, which included Vince, was eating cookies, sitting around and chatting about everyone’s plans for the Fourth of July, Earlywine recalled.

“Then we hit,” she said. “I didn’t really realize what was going on.”

Vince turned to his wife and told her she was bleeding from her head.

Others recalled more clearly the moment of impact.

“It was just a horrific, massive impact. The sound was just something I’ve never really heard before,” said one member of the group, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive event.

After the boat crashed it came to a stop, but the engines had not. They were roaring.

The man didn’t understand why the engines were still going. They had crashed. Shouldn’t someone upstairs be slowing down the engines?

“The first thing I questioned was, like, why isn’t the driver, why aren’t we backing down on the throttle?” he said. “I didn’t know what we hit — a boat, the pier — I didn’t know. ... I went outside and up top.”

What he found up above was a disturbing scene.

All six people on the upper level were down, apparently knocked unconscious. The entire deck was covered in blood, he said. From up above, the man could tell that the boat had crashed into the jetty, an outcropping of rocks that extends from the shore into the ocean.

Before he could deal with the injuries, the man realized that there was an even more pressing issue. With the engines still on, the boat was drifting from the jetty and heading back into deep water. He quickly took control of the boat and reversed it back into the jetty so its swim deck was on the rocks, which would allow people to get off the boat.

“If I had been knocked out, the boat would have gone out in deeper water,” the man said.

Down below there was another issue.

“I’m standing and looking around and the room downstairs is filling up with water,” Earlywine said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, why is there so much water coming in?’”

To stop the boat — which had a massive tear in its hull — from drifting into the water and potentially sinking, the man who had steered it back into the jetty found a few ropes.

He used one to secure a corner of the boat to a large rock on the jetty. A second rope attached to the boat was held by an onlooker who’d been fishing on the jetty before the crash.

Stopping the engines and bringing the boat back onto the jetty “saved the day,” Vince said. “He saved lives on this boat. He went up to the flybridge where the other six were. He had wherewithal to reverse the boat back into the rocks. We would have sunk in deeper water.”

Vince and his wife called their daughter, Abbey Vince, a lifeguard in Los Angeles County. She was at dinner nearby when the crash occurred.

“‘We hit something,’” Abbey recalled her stepmother saying.

She called 911, alerted the Coast Guard, got in her car and drove to the jetty. She knew where it was because her father’s phone alerted her after the impact.

On the boat, the man who steered the boat back onto the jetty was surveying the damage.

“It was just bad upstairs. There wasn’t any movement from most people up top,” he said. “They woke up after the people downstairs.”

There was a country song playing. It sounded eerie and discordant amid the frantic, somber mood on the boat, but he could not figure out how to turn it off.

Then he saw John Correa.

“John never woke up,” he said.

“I saw John. I checked his pulse. He was passed away,” Vince said.

Correa had broken his neck after being thrown into the control console of the boat, Vince said.

First responders began to arrive at the scene. One woman had her teeth knocked out by the crash. Vince initially thought the boat owner, King, was dead too. People were waking up, looking dazed and unsure of their surroundings.

“Their eyes were open, but they didn’t know what was going on,” Vince said.

As the boat sank lower and lower into the water, they were able to offload people from both areas. Finally, when the skybridge was at water level, first responders were able to retrieve Correa’s body.

Speculation and rumors swirled following the boat’s crash.

The three people who spoke with The Times sought to dispel the notion that Correa could have been piloting the boat. Correa did not know how to operate it and had spoken to people earlier about that, witnesses said.

All three people who spoke with The Times said that the owner of the boat, King, had been steering it earlier in the evening. But all were on the lower level when the boat hit the rocks, so none of them saw who was at the helm then.

“It’s not like he’s a rookie pleasure boater,” said the man who steered the boat back onto the jetty. “King spends a lot of time on the water. It’s something that we all are like, how did this happen?”

Times intern Sandra McDonald and Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.

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