George Pino's Birthday Boat-Crash Trial Goes to the Jury in Lucy Fernandez's Death, the Fight Before the Lindsay Clancy Trial, a Killer Dog

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning, and welcome to Daily Crime Injustice. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Monday, June twenty second, twenty twenty six, and we've got three cases on the board today, and every single one of them is about a warning somebody had and what they chose to do with it. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you. There's a thread running through all three of today's stories, and it's an uncomfortable one. It's the gap between I never meant for this to happen and I had every reason to know it. Could. We start in Miami, where a trial we've been following for two weeks is finally going to the jury. George Pino put twelve teenage girls on his boat for his daughter's birthday, drove it into a channel marker, and a seventeen year old named Lucy Fernandez never made it home. Today, twelve people decide whether that was an accident or a Then we go to Vermont, where a man with dementia was killed inside his own family's home by a dog that had already attacked at least three other people, a dog the town had already labeled dangerous In writing his own daughter is now charged, and we close. In Massachusetts, where the case of Lindsay Clancy, the mother who killed her three small children, is grinding toward trial, and the fight right now is over what a jury will even be allowed to see. Three cases, let's get into it.

1:35 Here's where things stand is of this recording. In Miami, fifty five year old George Pino is on trial for manslaughter and vessel homicide in the twenty twenty two Biscayne Bay boat crash that killed seventeen year old Lucy Fernandez. Both sides have rested and closing arguments begin today, with the jury expected to start deliberating this afternoon. In Essex, Vermont, forty three year old Jana Campbell has pleaded not guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of her seventy six year old father, Stephen Campbell, killed by her pit bull back in March. And in Plymouth, Massachusetts, thirty five year old Lindsey Clancy, charged with murdering her three children in twenty twenty three, was back in court for a pre trial hearing, with jury selection now set for July twentieth.

2:18 Three cases. Let's get into them. Story one the Birthday boat crash goes to the jury. If you've been with us these last two weeks, you know this one. George Pino, Biscayne Bay Labor Day Weekend, twenty twenty two. But today is different because today it ends, or at least the part the rest of us get to watch ends. Both sides have rested. Closing arguments start this morning, and sometime this afternoon, this case goes to a jury. So let me bring you all the way up to speed, because a lot has happened since we last talked. Quick refresher on how we got here. George Pino was hosting a birthday party for his daughter, she was turning eighteen, out at a sandbar in Biscayne Bay. Twelve of her friends were on the boat teenagers. On the ride back to the marina. The boat slammed into a channel marker and capsized, and seventeen year old Lucy Fernandez, a guest at someone else's birthday party, was killed. Her cause of death was ruled drowning after she was knocked unconscious and trapped under water.

3:22 Another girl on that boat, seventeen year old Katerina Puig Katie to the people who love her, suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her father took the stand last week and told the jury she's now in a wheelchair and needs around the clock care. She was an athlete before that day. She is not anymore. Pino, who's now fifty five, is charged with manslaughter and vessel homicide. He's pleaded not guilty, and I want to be precise about that, because a jury is deciding this today and he is presumed innocent. His defense has never argued that he wasn't the one driving he was. Their argument is that this was a tragedy and an accident and nothing more than that. Here's what happened in the last week. The prosecution closed its case with a forensic pathologist walking the jury through exactly how Lucy died, the blunt force injuries to her head and face, the very real possibility she was knocked out on impact and simply couldn't get herself out of the water.

4:21 No drugs, no alcohol in her system. She was seventeen years old. She did nothing wrong. Then the defense put on its case, and this is where it got interesting. They called a neurologist, doctor Diana Barrett, who told the jury Pino suffered a traumatic brain injury in the crash, a scalp wound that took seven staples to close, broken teeth, a stretch of unconsciousness, and she put a word in front of the jury that the defense very much wants them thinking about confabulation, the idea that when Pino gave investigators details that turned out to be wrong, misremembering who was sitting behind him, getting his own boat's engines wrong, he won lying his injured brain was filling in the gaps with information that felt true but wasn't. It's a real phenomenon. Whether it actually explains the holes in his account or just conveniently papers over them is exactly the kind of thing twelve jurors have to weigh. On cross examination, the lead prosecutor pushed the doctor on how much real evidence of amnesia there actually was, and the answer she got was not much beyond a few forgotten details. But here's the piece I keep coming back to for years in the civil lawsuits that grew out of this crash.

5:34 Pino's explanation was that another boat, an unidentified vessel going the other direction through a wake that caused or contributed to the crash, a phantom boat, And that explanation showed up in multiple sworn civil filings. Last week, the maritime attorney who represented Pino in that civil litigation took the stand and prosecutors walked him right up to the edge of it. The wake storyted entirely on Pino's own recollection. If there was no other boat, there was no wait. And the state's whole case is that the GPS data shows Pino on a collision course for several seconds, driving on the wrong side of the channel, accelerating from forty three to forty seven miles an hour straight into a marker painted bright dayglo green so people could see it, a marker he had driven past many times before. That's the real collision in this trial, not the boat and the marker, the accident story versus the data. The defense rested.

6:33 They asked the judge to throw the whole case out, a standard motion at that stage, and the judge said no. The state put on a short rebuttal and rested too, and that was it. The evidence is closed. So today the lawyers talk and then they sit down and twelve people in Miami carry this. Here's the question in front of them, and it's the same question. This whole show keeps running into When does an accident stop being just an accident. Two beers, a boat full of teenagers, a narrow channel, he knew well the wrong side of the waterway, seconds of warning on the GPS. The defense says, none of that adds up to a crime. The prosecution says, all of it does. I'm not on that jury, but I know whose name is missing from the end of this story, and I'm gonna say it before we sign off.

7:36 Let's go to Essex, Vermont, and I want to start with Stephen Campbell because he's the person who matters here, and he's the one getting lost in the headlines that are all about the dog. Stephen Campbell was seventy six years old. He had dementia in the medical language, a diagnosis of major neurocognitive disorder. Hold onto that detail because it matters, and I'll tell you why in a minute. He was a father, He was living in a home with family around him, and on March tenth of this year, he was killed in that home by a dog. Not a stray, not some animal that wandered in off the street. The family dog, a large, unneutered male pit bull named Jack.

8:17 Here's what investigators say happened. Jack grabbed one of Stephen's shoes off the floor. Stephen, a seventy six year old man with dementia, picked up the other shoe and swatted the dog with it, and the dog lunged. Stephen's daughter, Jana Campbell, who owned that dog, was right there. She told officers she tried to stop it. In her own words at the scene, she tried so hard, she said, but Jack was being vicious and she couldn't stick up for him because it wasn't right. The autopsy is hard to hear, so I'll keep it short and I won't linger. Bite marks and lacerations to his neck, his face, both arms, a compound fracture of his lower legs, a broken neck.

9:02 The medical examiner ruled the death accidental, and yet Jana Campbell, forty three years old, has now been charged with voluntary manslaughter and two counts of reckless endangerment. She has pleaded not guilty. So how do you get from a death the medical examiner calls accidental to a manslaughter charge. That gap is the entire case, and the answer lives in everything that happened before March tenth, Because this was not the first time Jack hurt somebody. Back in January, Jack attacked a delivery person who came to that house, somebody just doing their job, and hurt them badly enough that the victim went to the town and formally asked for a hearing. Essex has a process for this, they call it a potentially vicious dog hearing. The select Board held it and they ordered the dog's owner to take specific concrete steps, confine the animal when non residents came over, post warning signage, g training for the dog and the handler, get muzzling equipment. A whole list, a list designed to prevent exactly what happened in March. And here's where it turns.

10:10 Right after Stephen died, the Essex Police chief said the department believed the owner had been complying with those orders, regular follow ups. He said everything looked in order. But then when investigators announced the charges, they told a very different story. They said they had found a pattern of violent behavior. That Jack had attacked three other people on five separate occasions before he killed Stephen Campbell. Three people five times. That is not a dog that snapped once on a bad day. That is a documented repeated danger. Living in a home with a vulnerable elderly man who could not have defended himself if he'd wanted to. And the person legally responsible for that animal was prosecutor, say, the same person who knew its history better than anybody alive.

10:57 There's one more thread. The reason Janet Campbell was the sole owner of Jack is that the dog's previous owner, her boyfriend, had gone to jail, so she inherited an animal with a record and a court ordered safety plan she was supposed to follow. Jack is gone now. Campbell surrendered him and he was euthanized. As a condition of her release. She's barred from caring for the two other dogs in her home, and she cannot adopt, foster, or buy another animal. Look, I want to be fair here, because that's the job. Janna Campbell is charged, not convicted. She told officers she tried to pull that dog off her own father, and maybe she did. A jury, not me, decides whether what she did or didn't do rises to manslaughter.

11:43 But I'll say this much plainly. When a town holds a hearing, writes down the exact list of things you have to do to keep people safe from your dog, and a man still ends up dead on the floor of your home because of that very animal. Somebody has to answer for the distance between the warning and the day. Stephen Campbell couldn't protect himself. Somebody was supposed to. And we close in Plymouth, Massachusetts with a case we followed before and one of the hardest we ever have to cover. Lindsey Clancy. If you don't know the name, here's the weight of it. And I'm going to say their names first, because they are the reason this case exists at all.

12:29 Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson was three, Callen was seven months old. In January of twenty twenty three, in the basement of their family home, all three of them were strangled to death with exercise bands. Their mother, Lindsey Clancy, then tried to take her own life. She attempted to cut herself and she went out a second story window. She survived. The fall left her paralyzed. Lindsay Clancy, now thirty five, is charged with murder. And here is the unusual thing about this case. She has never denied that she killed her children. What her defense argues is that she was not criminally responsible, that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis. When it happened. That's the fight, not who did it whether the law can hold her responsible for it. We last brought you this case around the earlier pre trial maneuvering and the civil side of it.

13:23 Now the trial itself is close. Jury selection is set for July twentieth, and prosecutors think he could run as long as two months. And last Thursday, the two sides were back in front of Judge William Sullivan for what was supposed to be the final hearing before trial. A fight over what this jury will be allowed to see and hear. Let me walk you through it, because each piece tells you something about how brutal this trial is going to be. First fight, the family prosecutors asked the judge to keep Lindsay's parents and her sister out of the courtroom until they testified, claiming the three had refused to meet with the district attorney's team. Clancy's a attorney, Kevin Reddington, came out swinging, called that characterization flat out improper and said this isn't some drive by case with a shaky eyewitness where you're worried about people lining up their stories. The judge sided with the defense, the family can sit in that courtroom for the entire trial. Second fight, and this is the one with the label that made the headlines. Prosecutors want to put an expert on the stand to perform a physical demonstration about blood spatter and smearing.

14:29 Reddington called it his words, voodoo forensics, junk science, total speculation. The judge didn't kill it outright, but he's making the state clear a hurdle first, a separate hearing where that expert gets questioned and the demonstration gets vetted before a jury ever lays eyes on it. And I'll flag for you exactly what that means for us. Until that demonstration clears that hurdle, it is not evidence. We don't build anything on it, and neither should you. Third fight, the jury view. Prosecutors want to take the jury to the actual house where this happened. And the obstacle isn't the defense, it's the man who owns the home. Now, through his attorney, he argued a jury visit would be massively disruptive. A bus shows up, state police, the whole neighborhood, his partner who works from home, their pets. The prosecutor's response was sharp.

15:25 She pointed out that the current owner is himself a former prosecutor from her own office, a man who bought that house knowing full well a jury view might happen someday. The judge is allowing the visit, but he'll write in order to manage the logistics and limit how many people come. And the last one, the heaviest. Prosecutors plan to play the nine to one to one call that Lindsay's ex husband Patrick Clancy made that night. They say it is proof the killings were deliberate and premeditated. Reddington's response was honest in a way you don't always hear from a defense attorney. He said he objects to it because it's horrific, and then conceded that legally he has no basis to keep it out, so the jury is going to hear it.

16:08 I'm not going to pretend this one is simple, because it isn't. There are people who hear postpartum psychosis and feel the floor drop out of their certainty about what justice even means here, and there are people who hear three children strangled and feel that nothing else can possibly matter. Both of those are human reactions. My job isn't to tell you which one wins. A jury starts sorting that out in July. My job is to make sure that when we talk about this case we never reduce it to a legal puzzle, because underneath all of these motions, the family seating, the experts, the bust to the house, the tape, there are three children who are not here, and there is a reason we say their names. So that's where we are this Monday. In Miami, a jury takes the case of George Pino. Whatever they decide, Seventeen year old Lucy Fernandez should be finishing up her first year of college right now. Katie Powick should be running, not living in a wheelchair. They were kids on a boat and the adults were supposed to keep them safe.

17:15 In Vermont, Stephen Campbell seventy six years old, a father, a man whose own mind was already being taken from him by dementia, died in his family's home because of a dog the town had already warned about on paper, say his name. Nobody was in a better position to know that danger than the people living with it. And in Massachusetts, Cora Dawson and Callan Clancy, five three and seven months old are the reason that trial exists, not the motions, not the experts. Three kids. Someone has to say their names. Here's the thread one more time. In every one of these stories, the warning came first, the GPS track, the vicious dog hearing. We cover them not to wallow in the worst day of somebody's life, but because accountability requires witnesses, and because looking away is how the next warning gets ignored too. Do better. I'm Garrett Fisher.

18:11 This is Daily Crime and Justice. Before you go, two quick things before we close out. If something in today's episode hits you share it, tell one person, send it to the friend who follows these cases as closely as you do. That's how this show grows, and it's honestly the best thing you can do for us. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me. In the Pino case, when does an accident become a crime? I read them and I want to know where you land before that jury does. Legal disclaimer. A few notes for the record on George Pino. Mister Pino has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and vessel homicide and is presumed innocent.

18:55 As of this recording. Both sides have rested and the case is going to the jury, no verdict has been reached. If a verdict has been returned by the time you hear this, it came after we recorded. Everything attributed to prosecutors, to the defense, or to witnesses is argument and testimony, not proven facts. The medical and confabulation testimony we described is one expert's opinion and it was contested on cross examination. On Janet Campbell, Miss Campbell has pleaded not guilty to voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment and is presumed innocent. The medical examiner ruled Stephen Campbell's death accidental. The manslaughter charge reflects the prosecution's theory, not a finding of guilt. We note a discrepancy in the public record. The Essex police chief initially stated the dog's owner appeared to be complying with the town's safety orders, while investigators, in announcing the charges described a prior pattern of attacks. Both come from official statements, and we've reported the conflict rather than resolve it for you. On Lindsay Clancy, MS Clancy is charged with murder, has not denied her role in her children's deaths, and maintains through her attorney that she lacked criminal responsibility due to postpartum psychosis. Jury selection is set for July.

20:13 Thursday's proceeding was a pre trial hearing, not trial testimony. The rulings we describe concern what may be admitted, and the contested blood spatter demonstration has not been approved for use at trial. Nothing in this segment is a finding of fact by a jury. We name victims because they deserve to be named, and we cover defendants because accountability requires witnesses. We don't convict ahead of verdicts, and we don't pretend that verdicts are always justice. Today's episode touches on the deaths of children and on suicide. If any of it is weighing on you, support is available in the US and Canada. You can call her text nine to eight eight Do Better.