SVN solovelanet

27 SVN Solovelanet Global Even though he was not an athletic kind of person, he was big enough to make others hope they would never have to deal with him. Right from the start, Smith and his other two guests on board, Jacob Pepper and Heather Morningstar, who were regular passengers on Cimarron, noticed something odd in Pontious's behaviour. In the following days, things definitely got worse. Pontious had hallucinations, saying that there were black holes in the clouds and that he did not want to sleep in his forward cabin anymore because of the voices he heard there. Finally, he became convinced that he had to climb aboard a cloud in order to save himself from some great danger. So one evening while Smith was at the helm, he tried to grab the wheel to make the boat turn 360° and get closer to his cloud. Smith resisted and Pontious assaulted him, beating him repeatedly and then trying to strangle him. It was only thanks to the intervention of the other two passengers that the worst was avoided. The boat was sailing 300 miles from the coast, and Smith knew that it would take a couple of days to reach land. However, Pontious was obsessed with the cloud and still wanted Smith to take him there. Finally he shouted that if Smith refused to take him there he would go alone, and then jumped into the sea. All on board watched breathlessly as Pontious tried to swim away from the boat and disappeared beneath the surface of the sea a few minutes later. Smith threw a lifebuoy overboard and tried to call the Coast Guard, but with his instruments he could not succeed at that distance from the shore. Only the next morning did he get in touch with a ship that could forward the message of what had happened to the Coast Guard, and they then began a thorough search for the man by sending a C 130 and a patrol boat. After they got back to land, Smith, Pepper and Mor- ningstar were questioned by Coast Guard officers, who decided that the boat captain could not have done much more than what he did, and let him le- ave with his boat. Smith was sure that the matter was closed but two years later, in 2017, a prose- cutor invited him to testify before a commission. Smith declined after taking advice from his lawyer. A couple of months later, the same prosecutor pre- sented him with a plea-bargaining proposal, under which he would have served a few years in prison for manslaughter. He refused the plea bargain, but six months later some Coast Guard agents came to his house and arrested him on a manslaughter charge. He spent a few days in prison, and then his attorney bailed him out by paying a USD 25,000 bond. At present, Smith is still waiting for his destiny to be decided. He will have to stand trial and explain how hard it was to prevent a young man much bigger than himself (Smith was 66 at the time) and who was out of his mind, from jumping into the sea. Smith is facing up to ten years in prison. Pepper and Mor- ningstar have testified about how Smith tried to keep Pontious quiet. Moreover the latter's father has stated that his son suffered from depression. This was also confirmed when some boxes of psychia- tric drugs were found among the man's belongings. Despite all this, the prosecutor argues that a skipper is always responsible for the lives of the people on his boat. The Cimmaron while sailing David Pontious the passenger who committed suicide

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