A family of five from Stockton, two high school students and the owner of a Santa Cruz diving company are among the passengers of a boat that was engulfed by flames in Southern California, sending shock waves across the Bay Area, where most of the victims are expected to come from.
On Friday morning, officials began identifying some of the victims. As of Wednesday morning, 33 bodies were recovered and officials are still searching for one more. Five crew members were able to flee the devastating fire, but a sixth crew member, a 25-year-old woman, did not escape.
But as rescue turned to recovery, the names of those lost in the fire — believed to be one of the worst recreational boating disasters in state history — have begun to emerge. Here’s what we know so far about the victims:
Ted Strom
Ted Strom, 62, was identified as a victim of the Conception fire by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department. The Germantown, Tennessee resident worked at the Memphis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a spokesperson confirmed.
“His exceptional service to Veterans as a staff physician is a testament to the type [of] person that he was,” wrote medical center director David Dunning in a statement.
Wei Tan
Wei Tan, a data scientist from Santa Barbara, was confirmed to have been on board the Conception by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department on Friday morning. An avid hiker, runner and traveler, she loved diving and had recently took up surfing, according her older sister Cheerin Tan. Last Thanksgiving, she and her brother, Sejay, traveled to Cozumel on a dive trip; Tan had asked him to accompany her onto the Conception, but he was too busy to attend.
“It hurts, it will always hurt, but we will move on,” Cheerin wrote on Facebook in a post announcing the death of her “beloved little sister.”
Tan, born in Singapore, studied at the University of Michigan before completing a master’s degree at UC Berkeley. This June, she began a new job at Evidation Health.
“Our hearts are broken,” said Christine Lemke, co-founder & president of Evidation Health. “Her smile lit up the world and she’ll be sorely missed.”
Sunil Singh Sandhu
Sunil Sandhu, a Bay Area-based engineer from Singapore, had only picked up scuba diving two months ago, his father told The New Paper.
“My son had a beautiful character,” Sojit Singh said. “He was always smiling and never short-tempered. That is how I will always remember him.”
Sandhu had gotten his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University before joining Pointcloud as a senior scientist.
Kaustubh Nirmal and Sanjeeri Deopujari
Kaustubh Nirmal and Sanjeeri Deopujari were a married couple who lived and worked in the greater New York City area, according to the LA Times. Nirmal worked in finance, and Deopujari was a dentist. Both grew up in India, the Times of India reported.
“He found a soulmate in Sanjeeri,” Nirmal’s cousin, Rajul Sharma, told the LA Times. “Their love for each other was apparent even without them speaking about it.”
Justin Dignam
Justin Dignam, the founder of a Southern California payroll company with ties to water polo programs around the country, is among those who were aboard the Conception when it caught fire Monday.
Jeff Hill, the president of Big Fish Employer Services, which Dignam founded in 2003, said the company was “horrified” by the news.
“With a broken heart, I will lead us vigilantly as we await confirmation from the authorities,” Hill said in an email.
According to Team USA Water Polo, Dignam was a veteran water polo player, who played at University of Richmond before coaching at Iona College and Wesleyan University. He also served as a referee.
Adrian Dahood-Fritz and Andrew Fritz
Adrian Dahood-Fritz and Andrew Fritz recently moved to California from Texas.
Fritz was a professional photographer, according to his website, and taught photography workshops and classes in Texas.
Dahood-Fritz joined the state’s Ocean Protection Council in Sacramento in April 2019 as a marine scientist and policy advisor.
“She was a brilliant scientist who really cared deeply about the ocean and biodiversity,” said Lisa Lien-Mager, a spokeswoman for the California Natural Resources Agency.
She recently completed her Ph.D at George Mason University, with her research focusing on protected areas in the Antarctic.
“She cared deeply about the conservation and sustainability of the Antarctic region and continued her instrumental work in this region after she graduated, first as a post-doctoral researcher, and most recently as senior scientist/policy advisor at the Ocean Protection Council,” Kim de Mutsert, Dahood-Fritz’s former Ph.D adviser at George Mason, wrote in a eulogy on the university website.
Carrie McLaughlin and Kristian Takvam
Carrie McLaughlin and Kristian Takvam, two co-workers at Brilliant.org, a web-based science education website, went diving aboard the Conception over Labor Day weekend, according to the company.
McLaughlin was a senior software engineer and Takvam the VP of Engineering.
“Carrie and Kristian were incredible friends and colleagues who brought immense passion, talent, leadership, and warmth, and they will be missed dearly,” said Sue Khim, CEO of Brilliant, in a statement. “Our hearts are with their families and friends.”
Marybeth Guiney
Before setting off on a long, Labor Day weekend, Marybeth Guiney posted about her anticipation for a diving trip to her friends on Facebook.
Guiney, a sales director from Santa Monica, was a longtime diver who was a “fierce protector” of the oceans and the sea creatures who called them home, according to her friend of 10 years, Newsha Tarifard.
“She traveled all over the globe and tried to bring diving to anyone she could,” Tarifard said. “She even looked into setting up a business to bring people to corners of the world that were difficult to get to for divers.” Tarifard said Guiney will be remembered as a happy person who was “full of life” and a “wonderful friend who you could always count on.”
Chuck McIlvain
Charles “Chuck” McIlvain, who worked at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City for 15 years, was also among the passengers, his friend Alex Fisch, a Culver City councilman, told the Los Angeles Times.
Fisch texted McIlvain’s wife, Jasmine, who said her husband had been on the boat.
“It was a total gut punch,” Fisch told the Times, adding that McIlvain recently celebrated turning 44.
Neal Baltz and Patricia Beitzinger
Neal Baltz, a full-time engineer who studied winemaking in his spare time, was due to make a class presentation on Tuesday about wines he has discovered during a recent trip to Washington. His instructor at Yavapai College in Clarksdale, Arizona had his presentation ready to go when the class heard the news.
Baltz and his partner Patricia Beitzinger of the Phoenix area were both aboard the Conception when it caught fire, according to Michael Pierce, viticulture and enology director at Yavapai College. Pierce described the couple as “avid outdoors folks” and “adventurers.”
“Neal was friends with everybody. He had time for everybody and was a positive influence on all of us,” Pierce said. “We will miss him for a long time.”
Baltz worked as an engineer at a semiconductor company in Phoenix, according to his Linkedin page.
After Baltz graduated from the Yavapai wine-making program — where the average student is 48 — he endowed a scholarship so that other adults could also pursue their passion for wine.
Dan Garcia and Yulia Krashennaya
Dan Garcia, an Apple employee, and Yulia Krashnnaya, who worked for the company Spiralinks, were both aboard the Conception, their employers confirmed Wednesday.
Deirdre O’Brien, a senior vice president at Apple, said Wednesday that Dan Garcia was one of two Apple employees who were aboard the Conception.
Richard Stehn, a spokesperson for Spiralinks, said Krashennaya was a product manager and did contracting work for Cisco Global Event Marketing.
Garcia and Krashennaya were avid divers and underwater photographers.
The Quitasol-Sison Family
Among the passengers identified is a family of five from Stockton, who had been celebrating the birthday of Michael Quitasol, a registered nurse in his early 60s who had worked at Kaiser Permanente medical centers in Modesto and Manteca. Quitasol had been traveling with his partner, Fernisa June Sison, also was a nurse who had worked at St. Joseph’s Medical Center, and three of his daughters.
In a Facebook post, the women’s mother, Susana Rosa, confirmed “with a broken heart” that the family had been passengers on the Conception.
Like her dad and stepmom, Evanmichel Solano Quitasol, 37, known as Evan, had worked as a nurse in Stockton and Modesto hospitals, according to a Kaiser spokesperson.
Nicole Quitasol, 31, worked at a restaurant in Coronado, a sleepy beach community in San Diego County. She was a server and bartender at Nicky Rottens Bar and Burger Joint for almost four years, according to the restaurant’s CFO Bryn Butolph.
Angela Quitasol, 28, the youngest of the three, was a 7th-grade science teacher at Sierra Middle School in Stockton, where she also attended school years earlier.
She was also a former member of Port City Roller Girls, a women’s roller derby team, where she skated under the name Hermione Danger, according to team president Lisa Anderson.
The fourth Quitasol sister Christina, who did not go on the diving trip, and their mother Susana, also skated with the team, Anderson said.
Angela and her mother were very close.
“They did everything together – we have been picking out [derby] pictures, and her mom is in all of hers,” said Anderson.
Chris Rosas, Susana Rosa’s husband, said Tuesday that he and his wife had joined other relatives of the victims to await more information from authorities.
“We’re in Santa Barbara with all the other people who lost someone in the accident. We’re all talking to each other, just being together,” he said.
Raymond Scott Chan and Kendra Chan
A Los Altos resident who had worked as a physics teacher at American High School in Fremont for about three years, Raymond Scott Chan was on board the Conception with his daughter Kendra.
The school made an announcement to staff and students on Tuesday and said a crisis intervention team will be on campus throughout the week, according to a Fremont Unified School District spokesperson.
Charles McKinven, the store manager at Pacific Scuba Divers, a dive shop in Sunnyvale, said Chan was a regular customer there.
“Scott himself had probably been in the shop here as recently as back in May/June time frame,” McKinven said Tuesday when reached by phone. He said Chan was a certified diver and would come in for additional equipment and accessories. The cover photo on Chan’s Facebook profile page showed him diving near Santa Cruz Island.
Chan’s daughter, 26-year-old Kendra Chan, worked as a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife office in Ventura, California, according to the office.
Chan met his wife Vicki Moore, a Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner, at Stanford University. They also had a 22-year-old son, Kevin Chan.
Pacific Collegiate School students Tia Salika and Berenice Felipe, and parents Steve Salika and Diana Adamic
Steve Salika, his wife Diana Adamic and their daughter Tia Salika, who attended Pacific Collegiate School and was celebrating her 17th birthday, were among the missing, according to Adamic’s brother, James Adamic.
NBC News named 16-year-old Berenice Felipe as the second Pacific Collegiate School student on the boat.
Margo Peyton, who dived with the family for over a decade through her company Kids Sea Camp, described them as a “loving, wonderful” family of experienced divers. Tia was “incredibly smart and very mature for her age,” Peyton said.
“They enjoyed the ocean and enjoyed being together,” Peyton said. “They made adventure a part of their lives.”
Salika was an employee at Apple, the company confirmed Wednesday. Adamic, who worked at Apple in the past, was recently a contract humane educator for the Santa Cruz Animal Shelter, according to a statement by a former shelter educator, Jen Walker.
Tia Salika and Felipe also volunteered at the shelter, according to Walker.
“Her daughter Tia was an amazing young woman, filled with shy grace and the purest enthusiasm,” Walker wrote. “Her dear friend Bernice was a model of gentle support for the animals and children she worked with at the Shelter.”
Maria C. Reitano, head of school at Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, confirmed in an email that two students and the parents of one of those students from that school were also on the boat.
Kristy Finstad
Kristy Finstad, co-owner of a Santa Cruz-based diving company, was also on the boat, according to family members. Finstad’s Worldwide Diving Adventures had chartered the 75-foot commercial diving boat Conception for a Labor Day weekend excursion of the coast of Ventura County.
Finstad, a diving instructor and marine biologist who runs the company with her husband Dan Chua, was helping lead a weekend diving trip off the Channel Islands, according to a Facebook post by her brother, Brett Harmeling.
Reached by phone late Monday afternoon, Harmeling said he still hadn’t heard any information about his sister from officials, more than 12 hours after officials said the boat caught fire. Harmeling didn’t want to comment further.
Finstad worked part-time for the Santa Cruz’s Water Department on watershed health and protection from 2005 to 2015, when she left to run the family diving business full-time, according to a statement issued by the city.
“Kristina was a gifted interpreter of natural resources, and often led Department programs,” the statement said.
Emily Zimmel, the co-owner of Adventure Sports Unlimited, a dive shop and swim school in Santa Cruz, said the Finstad family is well-known in their “tight-knit diving community.” Zimmel’s company has co-chartered weekend trips with Finstad’s Worldwide Diving Adventures and has also chartered boats from Truth Aquatics, which owns the Conception.
Zimmel said the news of the tragedy has hit hard in the diving community, and while no official word has come out about Kristy Finstad, Zimmel’s family is grieving and in fear of her death.
“Kristy was a really bright soul. It’s been a really big bummer,” she said. “We broke down. I broke down. I cried, I cried hard.”
When the fire broke out on Conception, Zimmel was about 100 miles south on the Vision, also owned by Truth Aquatics, leading her own Labor Day weekend diving trip.
“All the people on our boat were definitely rattled with the news of the Finstad chartered boat. Everybody on our boat knew at least one person on (Conception),” she said, adding that they ended that trip early and came home.
“We’re a pretty small community and everybody is really cool with each other,” Zimmel said. “We’re all suffering. It’s going to be a hard one to come out of.”
Allie Kurtz
Allie Kurtz, 25, was working on the boat and was the only crew member who did not escape, according a GoFundMe page created by a family friend. Kurtz had worked at Paramount Pictures, her mother told KTLA.
“As the news has said there was one missing crew member. That crew member was my beautiful daughter Allie,” Kurtz’s father, Rob Kurtz, wrote on the GoFundMe page. “Allie had a heart of gold, and lived her life on her terms. She left the movie industry to follow her love of boating and scuba diving.”
“The only sense of comfort right now is knowing she passed doing what she loved,” Rob Kurtz wrote.
Lisa Fiedler
Lisa Fiedler, 52, of Mill Valley, loved to dive and even thought of herself as “part fish,” her mother Nancy Fiedler told ABC7 News, this news organization’s media partner.
Nancy said her daughter worked as a hairdresser but was also known for her stunning nature photography.
“Everybody loved her. She was a kind, gentle person. She was a naturalist, she loved nature,” Nancy said in a tearful interview with the station.
Laura Frederiksen, a co-owner and stylist of Salon Botanical in North Carolina, worked with Lisa Fiedler for almost a decade when Fiedler was a co-owner of the salon.
“She was an extremely talented hairstylist and one of the most adventurous girls I had ever met – she tried all different kinds of things,” said Frederiksen, who said Fiedler was an avid traveler and photographer, and began diving when she moved to California in 2005.
Frederiksen and other employees of the salon found out about Fiedler’s death after a former client saw Fiedler had posted on Facebook about going diving aboard the Conception.
“We’re all heartbroken here at the salon,” said Frederiksen.
More than a decade after Fiedler left North Carolina, her old clients still patronize Salon Botanical and ask about Fiedler.
“She has never been forgotten since,” said Frederiksen.
Vaidehi Campbell Williams
To her co-workers at the Soquel Creek Water District, Vaidehi Campbell Williams was lovingly known as the “Water Princess.”
“Vai was a very special person, a valued member of our Soquel Creek Water District family, and a beautiful, kind soul,” the public agency said in a recent post on its website.
The 41-year-old Felton resident worked 18 years at the district. She got her start as an intern in 1999 and 2000 while attending Scripps College, before signing on permanently in 2001. She held various positions and served most recently as the district’s communications specialist.
Williams had a passion for water and shared it by donning her water droplet costume at the Santa Cruz County Fair, Earth Day in the Park and the Water Festival, according to the post.
“Vai brought immense joy to work every day and was a dear friend to all of us at the district, and she became friends with many in the community whom she served so well,” the district said in the post. “May we always remember her infectious smile, kind heart, vast knowledge and adventurous spirit. Vai will forever be our ‘Water Princess.’”
Yuko Hatano
Yuko Hatano’s friends recalled her love of diving and tiny marine creatures, including nudibranchs or sea slugs.
“She would get so excited about the beautiful nudibranchs she would find,” said Michele Claussen in a Facebook post, noting that she met the 49-year-old San Jose resident on the Conception. “Tiny little colorful creatures were more amazing to her than the biggest fish and mammals. My heart goes out to her family and friends … she was a gift.”
Another friend, Vincent Christian, said he met Hatano through the Reef Check Foundation, which trains citizen-scientist divers to survey the health of reefs around the world.
“I am so very sad to have lost my good friend and dive buddy,” Christian wrote in a Facebook post last week.
Xiang Lin
Xiang Lin, 45, of Fremont, grew up in Beijing and moved to the United States to attend Brown University, where she earned a master’s degree in computer science, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The newspaper reported that Lin was a partner at Acorn Summit Ventures, a private equity and venture capital firm. She had previously worked as an engineer and program manager at Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies, according to the Times.
Lin was also active in local Chinese social groups and a strong advocate for women in technology, the newspaper reported.
The state’s mountains and beaches were beloved by Lin, according to the Times. Mission Peak, a popular hiking spot in her hometown, was one of her favorite places.
“Her generosity and charisma made her many friends who remember and dearly miss her,” her family told the newspaper in a statement. “She was warm, loving, athletic, courageous, intelligent, funny; her curiosity and passion have impacted and inspired many whom she came into contact with throughout her life.”
Check back for updates.
Staff writer Jason Green and Southern California News Group reporter Josh Cain contributed to this report.
Contact Thy Vo at tvo@bayareanewsgroup.com.
