GUILTY in the "Tooth in the Ashes," an OnlyFans Sentencing in a Fatal Fetish Death, a Father on Trial for a Birthday Boat Crash

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning and welcome to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it's Friday, June twelfth, twenty twenty six. Here's where things stand this morning. 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, a guest at his own daughter's birthday party. In Vista, California OnlyFans, model Mikayla riylars Dam has been sentenced to four years for the death of fifty five year old Michael Dale during a paid fetish encounter. And in Juno, Wisconsin, a jury has convicted Zachariah Rash of murdering his estranged wife, Crystal Rash and burning her body on their property. The case they call the tooth in the Ashes. Three cases, let's get into them. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you.

1:06 Every one of today's cases comes down to the same thing, a moment where somebody could have stopped and didn't. We start in Miami, where we brought you the opening of the George Pino boat crash trial on Wednesday. The testimony has begun in earnest now and it is brutal. A father took the stand to describe the last time he held his daughter alive, and in the middle of all of it, the judge had to stop the defendant's own supporters from getting up and hugging him in open court. Then we go to California to a sentencing in a case that is hard to talk about and harder to ignore. A man paid a woman for a fetish encounter, and somewhere in that encounter he started saying he wanted it to stop. He offered to pay her more money to stop.

1:51 He didn't walk out of that house, And this week we learned what her accountability looks like. Four years in a county jail. And we close in Wisconsin, where a story we've been following for two weeks finally has an ending. They call it the Tooth in the Ashes, a wife disappeared, Her husband told everyone she'd run off before, and investigators went digging in a burn pit out back. This week, a jury told us what they think happened. It took them about two hours. Let's go back to Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida, September of twenty twenty two. It was supposed to be one of the good days. George Peno was hosting a birthday party for his teenage daughter and eleven of her friends were on his boat. Teenagers, a sandbar, music, sunshine, the kind of afternoon you remember for the right reasons. Instead, on the way back to the marina, the boat slammed into a channel marker. The vessel capsized, and seventeen year old Lucy Fernandez, one of those friends, a guest at someone else's birthday party, was killed. A second girl on that boat suffered permanent life altering injuries. She will care that day in her body for the rest of her life.

3:02 George Pino, now fifty five, is charged with manslaughter and vessel homicide. He is pleaded not guilty, and I want to be clear about that. He is presumed innocent and a jury in Miami is going to decide this. His defense attorney, Howard Strebnick, has told that jury this was a pure accident, not recklessness by anyone. And here's what the defense has already conceded. Pino had two beers before he got behind the wheel of that boat, and he was the one piloting it when it hit the marker. Their argument isn't that he wasn't driving. Their argument is that none of this was his fault. The prosecution sees it differently. Prosecutors say Pino had been drinking before he took the wheel while hosting a party full of underage kids, and the testimony this week did not paint a quiet afternoon.

3:47 One of the daughter's friends, Camilla Alvarez, testified that the underage girls were drinking right alongside the adults. She estimated she'd had around ten drinks herself that afternoon. The boys were drinking, the adults were drinking. As Lucy's own father put it on the stand, everybody was having drinks. That father is Andres Fernandez, and his testimony is the part of this I haven't been able to shake. He told the jury about the last time he saw his daughter alive. She'd come over to his boat to ask for a rubber band and some sunscreen, small ordinary things. She gave him a hug. He said he remembers it clearly because that was the last time he held her alive. And then it got worse after the crash. Andresa and his wife couldn't find their daughter. They drove from hospital to hospital, not knowing where she was, not knowing if she was alive.

4:37 At the last hospital, they showed a receptionist a photo of Lucy on a phone, and the answer they got back was that, yes, someone had been brought in, but they couldn't identify her from the picture because she was in bad shape. That's the moment, he testified that he and his wife knew Lucy died. The next morning, when they finally got to be near her, on saw a large piece of fiberglass in his daughter's head and he went to remove it, and he was told, don't touch her. It's evidence. He said, he and his wife looked at each other and thought, our daughter's a piece of evidence. Sit with that for a second. Now here's the thing that got a courtroom rebuked this week. Emotions in that room are running high. The families of the girls on that boat are sitting in the same gallery as Pino's family, and during sidebars, people in the gallery kept getting up to offer Pino hugs, actual physical contact. In the middle of trial, Judge Marisa Tinkler Mendez shut it down. She called it absolutely unacceptable. Reminded everyone this is a court of law, not a sporting event, and not a social event.

5:44 But the prosecutor, Laura Adams, pushed it one step further, and I think she was right to. She told the judge, don't just admonish the people in the room. The person who should be admonished is the man allowing it to happen. She said Pino had been asked multiple times last week and this week not to engage in public displays of affection in front of the jury, and he kept letting it happen. The judge then warned Pino directly, no physical contact with anyone. Write notes to your lawyers. That's it. Look, I understand a family wanting to comfort someone they love. I do, But a teenage girl is dead, another is permanently disabled. And the optics of a defendant getting a receiving line of hugs while the people who lost Lucy sit feet away. That's a choice about what a courtroom is for. The judge was right. The prosecutor was writer.

6:36 This trial is not over. The jury hasn't spoken whatever you think happened on that water. The question in front of that jury is whether two beers and a channel marker add up to a crime or a tragedy. We'll stay on it, but before we move on, Lucy Fernandez seventeen years old. She went to a friend's birthday party and never came home. Someone has to say her name. Our second story takes us to Vista, California, and I'll tell you up front this one is grim. But there's a man at the center of it whose name almost got lost, and I want to make sure it doesn't.

7:23 His name is Michael Dale. He was fifty five years old. In April of twenty twenty three, he arranged to pay a woman named MICHAELA rylars Dam for a series of fetish activities. Rylar's Dam advertised her services online on OnlyFans, and the requests, according to the evidence prosecutors laid out, were extreme, things involving glue, things most people would find disturbing. I'm not going to walk you through the catalog. What matters is what happened when it went too far, because at some point during that encounter, Michael Dale wanted it to stop. His roommate testified that he heard Dale's voice through the house saying, can we stop. I'll pay you more money to stop. That's a man bargaining for his own life with the only currency he thought might work.

8:07 The roommate is the one who called nine one one. When the first officer arrived, Dale was on his back, his arms bound above his head, tape around his wrists, his legs wrapped. A medical examiner later ruled his death a homicide asphyxia with a plastic bag involved. He suffocated. And here's the detail that tells you who was in control of that room. Investigators said Rylar's Dam was sharing photos and videos of the encounter with her husband in real time, and that he was encouraging her to keep going messages where he expressed being excited by what she was sending. Those messages went out minutes before anyone called nine one one. Now, Ryler's Dam was originally charged with murder, but she reached an agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to a single count of involuntary manslaughter. And on Monday she stood in front of Judge Brad Weinreb to find out what that plea bought her. The answer was four years, and not even in state prison, four years to be served in county jail. Her attorney told the court she'd felt bad about this from the beginning, that she'd been in therapy even before the charges came. Ry lars Dam herself cried in court. She said she'd gone back and forth about whether to speak, but that it would be a poor example to her children if she didn't, that when something bad happens, we need to take ownership. Her husband and her uncle were reportedly sitting in the gallery as she said it. And I want to be fair here because the system did its work. The defense made real points. She didn't flee, she performed CPR, she waited

9:40 for the police and cooperated. The next day, the medical examiner acknowledged Dale had a high blood alcohol level and other conditions that could have made the asphyxia come on faster. A jury never weighed in because both sides agreed on a number instead. That's how a plea works. That's a legitimate outcome. But I'm gonna say the quiet part anyway. A man said stop. He said it more than once. He offered to pay more money to make it stop, and it didn't stop until he was dead. That's not a misunderstanding between two consenting adults. Consent that gets withdrawn and ignored. Isn't consent anymore. It's the moment everything changed.

10:21 Four years in a county jail is the price the system put on that. I'm not the jury and I'm not the judge. I'm just telling you that number is going to sit funny with a lot of people, and it should. Michael Dale, fifty five years old. He has to stop and someone has to say his name. And now to Wisconsin, where a story we've been living with for two weeks finally has an ending. If you've been with us, you know this one. We brought you day one of the Zachariah Rash trial and we check back in as the forensic evidence piled up. This week, the jury came back. So let me tell you how it ended, and then let me tell you who it was about.

11:09 Here's where we landed. On Tuesday, a Dodge County jury found Zachariah Rash, forty four, guilty of first degree intentional homicide and the charge for what he did to his wife's body after she was dead. The judge, Brian Fitzinger, revoked his million dollar bail on the spot and ordered him held until sentencing. That sentencing is set for July twenty first, he faces life in prison. And here's the part that tells you what the jury thought of the defense. They got the case around a quarter to four in the afternoon, and they had a verdict before six, about two hours. They did not need long. Let me remind you who we're actually talking about, because in a case name for a tooth, it's easy to forget there was a whole person. Crystal Rash thirty seven years old. She and Zachariah were going going through a divorce. Their kids had been removed and placed in foster care, and the state was moving to terminate their parental rights. And even with all of that weight on her, the people in Crystal's life described a woman who was climbing back up.

12:14 She was working with a county social worker. She was lining up her own apartment. She was fighting to stay in her children's lives. Her divorce attorney said she was eager to finish the divorce and start a new chapter. The prosecutor put it bluntly, she was not a woman phasing out of her own life. She was holding onto the parts that mattered. She was last seen on June eleventh, twenty twenty four, and then she simply stopped stopped answering her social worker, stopped showing up for her kids, stop talking to a best friend of twenty four years. When that friend was sitting with investigators, she suddenly started getting Facebook messages from a brand new account claiming to be Crystal.

12:57 The wording was wrong, the style was wrong, and whoever was behind it would not do the one thing that would have proved it was her get on a phone, get on video, show her face because she couldn't. Here's what investigators found on the Rash property, in a burn pit, a tooth and skull fragments. The tooth matched Crystal's dental records, the bone matched her DNA. Blood saturating the passenger side of Zacharias Mitsubishi matched to Crystal, with signs someone had tried to clean it and failed. Her debit card still being used after she vanished, including to buy bottle after bottle of drain cleaner and his phone. The searches on his phone weeks before she disappeared. He was searching whether you die instantly from a gunshot to the head and how long you can collect widows benefits? After she was gone, he was searching about cleaning, about bones, about sulfuric acid, about how fast police can get a warrant. There's a playbook for this, and he was reading from it in real time in his search history. Rash took the stand in his own defense and told the jury his wife shot herself, that she took his nine millimeter handgun while she was in the passenger seat of his car, and the gun went off, and that he saw it out of the corner of his eye. He admitted he panicked.

14:15 He admitted he lied to his friends, his family, and the police. He admitted he burned her and poured drain cleaner concentrated sulfuric acid over what was left. His own attorney conceded the lies and asked the jury to call them panic instead of murder. And look, I'll grant that grief and panic make people do strange, terrible things, But ask yourself this a woman who was, by every account, terrified of guns her whole life, who never owned one, who was busy lining up an apartment and fighting for her kids. That's the woman who supposedly grabbed his pistol and ended it in his passenger seat. While his search history from before she died was already asking about head wounds and widows benefits. The jury did the math in about two hours. I think you can too. There's a sentencing hearing coming on July twenty first, and we'll be there for it. But the verdict is the part that matters today, because for two years, the only version of Crystal Rash's death that existed out loud was the one her husband told. As of Tuesday, that's over. The record now says what actually happened. Crystal Rash, thirty seven years old, rebuilding her life one apartment and one supervised visit at a time when it was taken from her. Nobody was paying attention to her for two years except the people who loved her and the investigators who wouldn't let it go.

15:38 This week, a jury finally was someone has to say her name. Three cases, three families. Lucy Fernandez who went to a birthday party, Michael Dale, who has to stop Crystal Rash who was almost out the door to a new life. We say their names here because somebody has to. If today day's episode hit, you do one thing for me, share it, send it to one person who follows these cases the way you do, or who should. Word of mouth is the entire reason a daily show like this one reaches anybody, and you are the way that happens. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. Tell me what you think about that four year sentence or whether the Pino jury should call it an accident. I read them and the best ones shape where we point the show next. Wherever else you're listening, YouTube your podcast app, follow rate, and tell a friend. This program covers active and recently concluded criminal cases and is based on reporting from Court, TV and other news outlets. Details may change as proceedings continue. George Pino has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter and vessel homicide and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. His trial is ongoing and no verdict has been reached. Statements attributed to witnesses, prosecutors, and the defense reflect courtroom testimony and argument, not proven fact. Mikayla riylers Dam was originally charged with murder and pleaded guilty

17:10 to a single count of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Dale. Her four year sentence reflects the terms of that plea agreement. Zachariah Rash was convicted on June ninth, twenty twenty six of first degree intentional homicide and a corpse related count in the death of Crystal Rash. That second count has been described by different outlets as both hiding a corpse and mutilating a corpse. His sentencing is scheduled for July twenty first, twenty twenty six. He maintained his innocence at trial. This episode references a defendants claim that a death was a suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine to eight in the United States for free confidential support. Daily Crime and Justice is a production of Calaroga Shark Media