Plea deal is coming for tugboat captain in crash that killed girls on sailboat

David Goodhue, Miami Herald on May 12, 2026

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MIAMI — The operator of a tugboat pushing a barge that crashed into a summer-camp sailboat in Biscayne Bay last summer, killing three young girls, is negotiating a guilty plea with prosecutors to spare the victims’ families from a trial, his attorney told the Miami Herald on Tuesday.

“The case will be worked out. My client will not put the families through a trial and expose them to relive this terrible tragedy,” Walter Reynoso, the Coral Gables defense attorney for Yusiel Lopez Insua, said in an email.

WPLG-Local 10 reported that the deal is expected to be made in July.

Federal prosecutors charged Lopez Insua, 46, with seaman’s manslaughter in March for operating the barge with obstructed visibility and without a proper lookout. He was facing 10 years in prison if convicted. The charge was recommended by agents with the U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service in October.

Reynoso did not provide details of the plea negotiations.

The crash happened around 11 a.m. on July 28, 2025, when Lopez Insua was operating a 25-foot tug pushing a 108-foot-long, 149 gross-ton barge hauling concrete debris from a seawall-disassembling job on Star Island. The barge slammed into a 17-foot Hobie Getaway sailboat operated by a 19-year-old Miami Yacht Club camp counselor with five girls on board.

Three of the campers — Mila Yankelevich, 7; Erin Victoria Ko Han, 13; and Arielle “Ari” Mazi Buchman, 10, were trapped beneath the barge and tangled in the wreckage of the sailboat — drowned. . The counselor and two other girls, ages 7 and 8, survived.

Both young girls who survived were seriously injured. One of them, 7-year-old Calena Areyan Gruber, was trapped underneath the barge, but swam to safety.

Prosecutors said in the March 31 charging document that Lopez Insua’s cellphone was unlocked in the wheelhouse, and he was “on internet marketplaces, including at the time the collision occurred.” Prosecutors said Lopez Insua’s view was obstructed by the cargo, a deckhouse and crane on the barge.

The barge was hauling the debris to Di Lido Island in Miami Beach across the bay when the crash occurred.

Prosecutors said the area of Biscayne Bay that the tug was transitting was known to be busy with sailboats and that Lopez Insua had several “near misses” in the days prior to the collision.

Two crewmen were on the barge, but neither was assigned as a lookout, according to the charging document. Prosecutors said the sailboat lost wind propulsion when it crossed paths with the barge, and Lopez Insua did not reverse course or slow down before crashing into the smaller craft.

The charging document also states that the counselor stood up and tried to alert the tug crew that the boat was about to be struck.

The parents of the three girls who died filed a negligence lawsuit in December against Waterfront Construction, the Miami company that owns the tug and barge. The owner of the company, Jorge Rivas, has not been charged.

The sailboat was among the first boats to leave the Miami Yacht Club’s dock near the MacArthur Causeway and head east in Biscayne Bay toward Hibiscus Island in Miami Beach that morning, the pending suit says. The weather was clear and the water calm on that Monday morning, but the barge “made no attempts to slow down or change its course,” the lawsuit alleges.