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A 21-year-old man, who died Saturday night after boarding a boat on a cruise, had "played horseback," according to a statement from the Bay State Cruise Company, owner of the boat.
The man was identified Sunday afternoon by the Plymouth District Attorney's Office, Aaron Dibella, of Peabody.
Dibella was in the water for a few minutes while crew members and party goers were trying to save him, but he fell and died.
"The tragic and overwhelming sadness that went through all of us," Bay State Cruise Company owner Michael Glasfeld said in a statement. "There are no words – none – to convey our deepest and most sincere sympathies."
Dibella went to sea around 8:30 pm Saturday, after attending a tropical boat cruise on the Provincetown II liner, which left the port at around 7:15 pm, Glasfeld said.
His body was recovered from the water around 1 am by scuba divers from the state police.
Dibella had climbed and was sitting on a bulwark, which serves as a guardrail, according to the company's statement. A member of the crew asked him to get off, but after the crew member's departure, "the passenger started to play even more dramatically".
It was hard to know what was the dangerous game that had preceded him.
"At first I thought it was funny. Everyone did it, "said Joshua Fitzgerald, 21, who was on the boat, during a phone interview Sunday. "But then everyone would knock on the window and tell him to get on the life raft. He continued to pass and he continued to swim.
He said that he thought Dibella was in the water for five minutes or so.
A crew member went into the water to try to rescue Dibella. Fitzgerald said that the crew member who entered the water jumped after Dibella passed.
The crew member was within 5 feet of the Dibella, but could not save him, according to the company's statement.
"We had located it and illuminated it with the ship's position light, the different lifebuoys were a few meters away," Glasfeld said in the statement.
Glasfeld did not identify the crew member who tried to save him "out of respect for his family".
Alcohol was served on board from the moment the boat left the dock until Dibella was at sea, Glasfeld said.
In an email, he told The Globe that the rules for marine alcohol are "stricter" than those applicable to land and that his staff is "certified to serve alcohol".
Glasfeld stated that the number of crew members on board – 13 Navy and 14 crew members – was "about three times higher than required by [United States Coast Guard] staffing requirements. "
He also stated that many of his crew members are trained to an international standard that is required only for international offshore cruise ships, which he described as "well beyond the requirements of national ship operators ".
Part of this advanced training includes life saving, crowd control, and "managing human behavior," which he said was related to Saturday night.
Glasfeld stated that the crew routinely performs exercises in scenarios required by the Coast Guard and that the equipment on board exceeds the required amount.
"In the case of man overboard yesterday, the crew had at its disposal twice as many life rings as needed," he said in a statement.
He said his boats had biweekly exercises, although the coastguards only require them every month.
"That's why so many lifebuoys went into the water so quickly and the crew quickly positioned at the ship's rescue point with the other recovery device. ", he said in a statement to the Globe.
More than 1,000 people were expected, according to the publication of the event on Facebook.
"The only sign that something went wrong was that the music was cut off," Kelly Schwing, a party girl, said in a Twitter message. "The water was filled with boats looking for it – over 15, maybe more, and the crew did not tell us anything for about 40 minutes."
Party-goers said people threw flotation devices and bins on their side to give Dibella something, but he did not take it.
After the disappearance of Dibella, the cruise in the harbor has backtracked. Tensions erupted on board, Fitzgerald said, as people tried to cope with what had happened.
"Everyone was crying and out of control," Fitzgerald said. "People were screaming and fighting, and a lot of people had a lot of alcohol."
In one video One of the passengers shared Saturday on Twitter, young people in Hawaiian-print shirts and party clothes stood inside the boat, wondering what had happened and looking anxiously at their phones.
"You see someone dying right in front of you, and you can hardly believe it," Fitzgerald said. "I drank more after my return home, just to try to cope with that."
Amelia Nierenberg can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @ajnierenberg.
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