The dive boat Conception smolders at sunrise on Sept. 2, 2019, before sinking. (National Transportation Safety Board)

Over Labor Day weekend in 2019, a fire broke out in the early morning hours on the Conception, a 75-foot wood and fiberglass dive vessel in Santa Barbara Harbor, CA. All 33 passengers sleeping below decks and one of the boat’s crew of six died in the blaze.

The Conception‘s captain, Jerry Boyle, 70, was sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday, according to a statement from the Justice Department. After a 10-day trial, a jury found Boylan guilty in November 2023 of one count of misconduct or neglect of ship officer – an offense commonly called “seaman’s manslaughter.”

Prosecutors wrote in a presentencing report: “When the fire was discovered on the Conception, Boylan was the first to abandon the boat by jumping into the ocean and ordered his crew members to abandon the boat without making any efforts to save the 33 passengers and one crewmember, even after two other crewmembers returned to the Conception to look for survivors.”

“The defendant’s cowardice and repeated failures caused the horrific deaths of 34 people,” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada. “The victims’ families will be forever devastated by this needless tragedy. While today’s sentence cannot fully heal their wounds, we hope that our efforts to hold this defendant criminally accountable brings some measure of healing to the families.”

“The fate of the victims on the Conception might have been different were it not for the negligence of the defendant,” said Mehtab Syed, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “I want to commend the collaborative effort by investigators and prosecutors that led to today’s sentence and hope that it delivers a measure of justice to the victims’ families as they continue to heal from this tragedy.”