Newport police have released body camera video of the 26 August shooting aboard Pathfinder, a 40-foot sailboat stolen from New Jersey, in which 27-year-old Brendan Norris of Newport was killed. Police Chief Ryan Duffy published the footage on 30 October. One officer was shot in the leg and has since returned to work, WPRI reported.
What the video shows
According to Duffy, the Newport harbormaster spotted an anchored sailboat in the north part of the harbor that matched the description of Pathfinder, which had been reported stolen out of New Jersey. The name appeared to have been scraped off the stern. The harbormaster called the police after seeing someone moving around on board, and brought four officers out to the boat just after 9 a.m.
The video shows a man on the bow pulling up the anchor with the engine running. Officers shout at him to show his hands and stay on deck. He goes below instead. Duffy said the officer who boarded saw him rummaging in the cabin and a metallic object that looked like a gun. A shot from inside the cabin hit that officer in the leg, and officers returned fire. They found Norris unresponsive in the cabin with a severe head injury and a firearm next to him. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The injured officer was named at a City Council meeting as Sergeant Jack Billings, the Boston Globe reported. Newport police and Rhode Island State Police opened a joint investigation. "All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law," Duffy said in the video.
The boat and its owners
Pathfinder is a 1968 Hinckley Bermuda 40 Custom Yawl owned by James and Jennifer Bonomo, according to the Globe. It had been docked at the same Jersey City marina for a decade. When the couple went down for a day of sailing around New York Harbor in August, it was gone. Marina surveillance video from the night before showed someone hopping a fence, boarding the boat and taking it out into open water.
Why the scraped name gave it away
A boat's name is the easiest part of its identity to remove, and on Pathfinder the missing name is what the harbormaster noticed. The numbers that identify a boat are harder to get rid of.
Boats built since 1 November 1972 carry a 12-character hull identification number on the starboard side of the transom, plus a hidden duplicate somewhere inside the hull. Where the HIN is on a boat covers both. Pathfinder was built four years before that rule. Larger boats can be federally documented instead of state registered, and a documented vessel has to carry its official number, preceded by "NO.", in figures at least three inches high on an interior structural part of the hull. Under 46 CFR 67.121, it must be fixed so that removing or altering it would be obvious. Sanding a name off a transom takes an evening. Taking that number out of the hull leaves damage anyone boarding can see.
What a buyer can check
Pathfinder was found because a harbormaster knew what the boat should look like. A buyer looking at a used boat can do a version of the same check before any money changes hands. Read the HIN on the transom and compare it, character by character, with the title and registration. Boat title vs HIN explains what a match proves and what it doesn't. Look for grinding marks, filler or fresh paint around the number and where a name used to be. For a documented boat, search the official number in the Coast Guard's vessel register and find the same number inside the hull.
The free HIN decoder reads the builder and model year from the hull number, so a listing that says one thing and a HIN that says another shows up before you travel. It can't tell you whether a boat is stolen. That check goes through the local police or the state agency, and the free boat VIN lookups lists what each one can and can't show.
Check the boat, not just the listing
Type the 12-character hull number from the transom. The decoder reads the builder, build month and model year, and the recall lookup lists any US Coast Guard recall campaign on record for that manufacturer. Free, no account.
