George Pino of State Street Realty is charged with the crime

Commercial real estate broker George Pinault is now facing manslaughter charges in a fatal boating accident in Biscayne Bay that killed a 17-year-old girl and seriously injured her classmate.

Pinault, president of Doral-based State Street Realty, was piloting a boat with 14 passengers, including his wife, daughter and 11 other teenage girls, when the vessel crashed into a concrete channel marker on the Sunday of the 2022 Labor Day weekend. Prosecutors originally filed reckless boating charges against Pinault last year, but have now changed them to felony charges after a key witness spoke out. This is reported by the Miami Herald.

Pinault, 54, now faces a charge of vehicular manslaughter/reckless operation, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Pinault and his attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pino’s boat, traveling about 50 miles per hour, crashed in the Cutter Bank area, throwing all on board and killing Luciana “Lucy” Fernandez, a 17-year-old student at Our Lady of Lourdes Academy. Kateryna Puig, then the captain of the Lourdes soccer team, who had already graduated from high school, suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Matthew Smiley, a firefighter with Miami-Dade Fire-Rescue who witnessed the crash, told prosecutors that Pinault appeared intoxicated shortly after the crash.

Last year, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office announced that they had conducted a thorough investigation. But reports in the Miami Herald later punctured the investigation, revealing that three other witnesses provided their phone numbers to investigators but were never contacted.

Pinault, who told an officer at the scene, “I had two beers,” also failed a field sobriety test.

The Pooch family’s civil suit against Pino and his wife, Cecilia Pino, resulted in a $16 million judgment against Cecilia Pino and a settlement with Pino.

Pinault has more than 26 years of experience in real estate brokerage, property management and development, according to State Street’s website. Over the course of his career, he has closed more than 26 million square feet of sales and leases valued at $1.75 billion. Cecilia Pino is also an executive at State Street.

––– Lidia Dinkova