AMALFI COAST, ITALY: The skipper of a rented motorboat that collided with a yatch off the coast of Italy, killing a renowned US tourist who was the president of a leading publishing house, is being investigated for manslaughter and causing a shipwreck. The victim, Adrienne Vaughan, 45, was the head of Bloomsbury Publishing’s US branch which has published renowned books.
The projects she has worked on included, JK Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series. 'The Testaments' by Margaret Atwood, 'The Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini, 'Eat Pray Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Bel Canto' by Ann Patchett, 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain, and 'A Promised Land' by Barack Obama.
What are the charges against Adrienne Vaughan's speedboat skipper?
.The accident happened on Thursday, August 4, when Vaughan was on her "dream vacation" with her husband and two children. They had left the town of Amalfi and were heading to Positano, another popular tourist destination on the Amalfi Coast. Vaughan was sunbathing on the bow of the motorboat when it crashed into the stationary sailboat’s bow. The sailboat was hosting a wedding reception with about 70 guests on board, including American and other foreign tourists, Associated Press reported.
Vaughan, as per Italian media, was thrown into the water by the impact and died before she could be taken to hospital. Daily Mail previously reported that after being thrown overboard, Vaughan was hit by the propellers of the boat.
Her husband, Mike White, suffered a shoulder injury
Two doctors from the reported 130-foot sailing yacht dived into the sea to try to save her while a nearby vessel brought her to shore. Her husband, Mike White, suffered a shoulder injury and is being treated at another hospital. Their two young children were unharmed and are staying with their grandfather who flew to Italy to help.
The skipper of the motorboat, an Italian man who has not been named, is also hospitalized with fractures to his pelvis and ribs. He is under investigation by Salerno Chief Prosecutor Giuseppe Borrelli who, as per AP, said his blood samples showed traces of cocaine, but more analysis was needed to determine the effect on his ability to pilot the boat. As for now, no charges have been filed against the skipper. “The results are being evaluated by a consultant of the prosecutor’s office since the data per se aren’t necessarily significant,” Borrelli said at a news conference in Salerno on Saturday.
'The results are being evaluated'
He added that more evaluation was needed to determine “the incidence of the levels on the ability of the subject” to pilot the boat. The yacht's captain told Italian media that the motorboat was speeding when it hit his boat. He said he had tried to avoid the collision by turning his boat, but it was too late. “I saw them coming at full speed towards us. I tried to turn the boat to avoid them, but they hit us right in the middle,” he said. “It was a terrible scene. There was blood everywhere.”
Vaughan had been working for Bloomsbury since 2018 and had overseen the publication of several award-winning and bestselling books, including 'Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South' by Winfred Rembert which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2022.
