Five people are confirmed dead after the so-called “superyacht” named “Bayesian” sank off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily on Monday, August 19. UK tech entrepreneur and billionaire Mike Lynch, owner of the yacht, is among the dead.
After days of recovery efforts, the five bodies have been removed and identified. The victims include Lynch, his wife Judy, Chris and Neda Morvillo, and the head of Morgan Stanley, Jonathan Bloomer.
Mike Lynch’s daughter, 18-year-old Hannah, is still missing, and is almost certainly dead. The yacht sank during a brutal storm at sea.
Friends and associates are paying tribute to Lynch. Among them is Lord John Browne, who is with the biomedical research agency called the Francis Crick Institute. Francis Crick was famous for co-discovering the spiral helix structure of DNA. Browne said Lynch was a “human of great ability.”
Six of the people on board the luxury ship died, and four of the bodies were recovered on August 21, with Lynch’s body, being recovered in the early morning hours of August 22nd. The body of the chef, Recaldo Thomas, was first pulled from the sunken ship earlier this week.
Two people were trapped behind a bed inside their cabin, but it is not clear who they belonged to.
The Bayesian had a total of 22 people aboard, and 15 of them were rescued just after the ship capsized at 5 a.m. local time off the Sicilian coast.
Salvo Cocina, Sicily’s civil protection director general, offered his sympathy and condolences to the families of the dead.
The family of Chris and Neda Morvillo said they were in grief at their “tremendous loss.” They said they were “completely devastated,” and that they send their love to the families of the others who lost their lives aboard the doomed ship.
While it is known that the ship turned over during an especially violent storm, there is not yet any more detail on exactly what may have happened.
