60 warnings
AND
Zero Engineers
There wasn’t a lot of music in the Foscato home.
Vince didn’t listen to any for at least a year following Voss’s accident. Danielle (Dani) says she still doesn’t. Not really.
Movies were hard, too. The family tried to watch the 2022 release of Pinocchio. Gepetto loses his son before the wooden, fairy tale character comes to life, partially filling a hole that no parent can ever fill. Vince and Dani wept as they looked at Dax, Voss’s lively little brother. The parallels were too close to home. They couldn’t finish the movie.
If there were any notes filling the air, they usually had the subtle scratch of vinyl and the texture of decades-old recordings. “We all started listening to oldies, because none of it reminded us of anything. Everything else did,” Vince explains.
Hello,
Baby!
Nine months before the accident, the mood in the Foscato house was completely different. At the time, Finn was nine and Sloane was seven. After years of trying, there was a baby in the house again.
“[It was] the happiest I’ve ever been, because I really wanted Voss in our lives,” Dani recalls. The uncertainty of giving birth during a pandemic was behind her. Voss was home. He was happy, healthy, beautiful, and safe. They made it. “Just complete bliss,” says Dani.
LAKE BOUND
Ever since Dani was a little girl, her family would go to the lake. Right when school got out. It was officially summer, time for swimming, tubing, s’mores by the campfire and catching fireflies. Even these memories seem different now. They were shattered in the same moment everything else was.
In 2021, the Foscatos decided, last minute, to go on the annual lake trip. Vince remembers a quiet, peaceful moment during their final boat ride. Everyone was happy and content. “It was a really nice family vacation. And then, there was this carpet pulled out from underneath us,” he says. “It went from day to night.”
THE FACTS OF THE ACCIDENT
The driver turned to check on passengers as the boat approached an overpass
He lost situational awareness, veering too close to a bridge pillar
The driver took evasive action and banked hard left, sideswiping the pillar with the right hull
The glancing impact, and the damage to the boat, were relatively minimal
However, as a result, a boat component failed
It struck Vince and Voss Foscato in their heads, ejecting both of them from the boat
TIME STANDS STILL
Vince went in one direction, to a local hospital. Voss had to go in another, an hours-long trip that felt like days, to St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Dani wasn’t sure if she’d see Vince again. The towel around his head was soaked in blood. He was badly injured too.
Thunderstorms prevented a life flight. Dani and Voss had to make the trip by ambulance. The rain was torrential, the driver’s knuckles white.
When they arrived in St. Louis, Dani was still wearing a swimsuit.
Dozens of people rushed in and out of the emergency room. Barking orders. Get this, get that, doctors running the show and in the back corner, Dani was unable to do anything. She felt helpless.
The beeps and rhythm of the machines hooked to her baby boy blocked everything else out. The only thing she could do was stare at the screen monitoring Voss’s brain pressure. “Don’t go up, don’t go up, don’t go up,” she prayed.
Vince recovered and joined Dani. They lived in the corner of an ICU room for the days and weeks that followed.
a new reality
Voss’s injuries lead to severe brain damage, with lifelong cognitive and physical impairments. The right half of his body is paralyzed. He’s nonverbal and will likely remain so. Vince and Dani know they’ll probably be changing diapers for the rest of their lives.
Voss had seizures. Multiple per day. Agonizing, for him and his parents. Medicines and steroids didn’t help. The doctors recommended a procedure that would separate the left hemisphere of Voss’s brain from the damaged right side. There weren’t any good options. This was the last, best chance to give their son some level of comfort.
The seizures stopped, but they lost even more of Voss. “He wasn’t the same,” Vince reveals. “He hasn’t been ever since.”
Part of Voss’s skull was removed to allow room for his brain to swell. The process of putting synthetic bone back in was excruciating. Every day, the Foscatos filled balloons inside Voss’s skin. The liquid would stretch the tissue, creating room for his new cranial implant. Voss wailed the entire time.
A tragedy that many saw coming
The further we got in discovery, the more appalled we became. The boat component didn’t just fail once. The same part had malfunctioned in at least 60 other boats, all under normal operating conditions. There were only 451 units on the water. The failure rate was astounding.
Internal memos between the boat company and the component manufacturer detailed the safety risks. Employees raised warnings that they were, in their own words, “putting a dangerous product on the water.”
The companies devised a 2-step patch to fix the issue, but noted in documentation that both steps had to be performed. If one was completed, without the other, the boats wouldn’t be any safer than they were to begin with.
The boat Voss was in had one part of the patch. The boat company chose not to pay for the second. Even though they knew half a solution was the same as no solution.
It was hard to share this information with the Foscatos. Everything they were going through — and would be for years to come — was preventable. The issue wasn’t a surprise. It was known. Voss’s life should still be one for him to choose.
The cover up was obvious, which ratcheted up the pressure. The Foscatos are what’s called “Forever Parents,” with lifelong costs for Voss’s care estimated in the tens of millions of dollars. We couldn’t let them down.
THe Defense’s Last Gaffes
This tragedy wasn’t a matter of if, but when. During depositions, we discovered that there were no engineers — or even people who studied engineering — in either company’s “engineering” department. Zero.
According to the Senior Vice President of “Engineering” at the boat company, there hadn’t been an actual engineer in his department for the nearly 20 years he’d been employed there.
There wasn’t much actual physics in the defense’s expert physics testimony either.
One of the defendants’ primary theories was that Vince and Voss had been injured as a result of being thrown from the boat, not by the failed component. They produced an animated accident re-creation attempting to validate this tale. In it, Vince and Voss were ejected before the component failed. It couldn’t have caused their injuries, they argued.
Notably, the physics re-creation didn’t include any other boat passengers. The omission was glaring.
When our own experts vetted the model, it was obvious why. The defense tried to include other passengers, but when they had manipulated the physics enough to prove their outlandish theory, the results were comical. People who were known to have stayed on the boat were violently thrown 50 feet, crashing into the bridge. Instead of making the physics accurate, they tried to remove proof of their deception.
It didn’t work.
The sun does shine again
There’s music in the Foscato home these days. Literally and figuratively. Dani admits she’s still working on getting there, but “it does exist again,” Vince says. “It’s back and maybe even a little bit more enhanced, understanding the delicacy of life and how quickly things can change. We make it a point to see those things, acknowledging those parts of life that we love and enjoy.”
One of those things is Grandpa Tom. Dani’s parents live right next to the Foscatos. Her dad has made it his life’s work to be there for his grandson. He walks with Voss in his trainer daily, sometimes twice a day.
Dax is almost three. He’s a little madman, in the best, most adorable way. Another Foscato is on the way. There are baseball games to go to, and dance lessons. Time isn’t standing still as much as it did before.
All we wanted was for Vince and Dani to never worry about the cost of Voss’s care. It’s also good to know he’s surrounded by a big, loving family. And happiness. And, sometimes, music.