Appeals court acquits man of causing dive buddy's death

The Court of Criminal Appeal has cleared a man of criminal responsibility for the 2020 death of his dive buddy, ruling that he had done everything he could have reasonably been expected to do in the circumstances, overturning his conviction for involuntary homicide..

In November 2022, 60-year-old Arthur Castillo, a company director from Sliema, had been found guilty of involuntarily causing the death of Christine Gauci through negligence during a dive at Mġarr ix-Xini in Gozo in January 2020.

Gauci, a 35-year-old AFM soldier from C (Special Duties) Company, was also a diving instructor and would free dive in her spare time.

It had emerged before the court of magistrates that Castillo, a long-time friend of the victim, had planned a dive with Gauci and four other friends on the day in question. He had released a statement during the investigation into Gauci’s death, explaining that she had bumped into him on the Gozo ferry before the dive, and had told him that she had been awake for the preceding 20 hours because of work duties. 

Castillo’s girlfriend had tried to convince the victim not to dive, he recalled, but Gauci had brushed this off, saying that the cold water would refresh her and wake her up.

During the dive, in which two other diving pairs also participated, Gauci had encountered repeated buoyancy problems which Castillo had assisted her in recovering from. Using hand signals, Gauci had signalled to her dive buddy that she wanted to continue, every time he asked, Castillo had said in his statement.

She had also insisted on continuing with the dive, after getting tangled up with a fishing net in an underwater cave.

When she had once again started an uncontrolled ascent, Castillo had shifted two 1kg lead weights from his weight belt onto hers, to which Gauci had added a heavy rock from the seabed. She signalled to her buddy that she wanted to continue with the dive.

But tragedy struck when Gauci had suddenly shot towards the surface, out of control. After ascending to the surface as quickly as was safely possible, the divers had found Gauci face-down in the water near the rocky shore. There was no air left in her tanks.

In a judgement handed down this morning, Madame Justice Consuelo Scerri Herrera said that this case could not be put down to negligence on Castillo’s part. The buddy system used by divers all over the world was there to ensure that assistance was available, but did not mean that the two divers were responsible for each other's actions, said the judge. 

The court noted that the woman’s autopsy had established the causes of death as having been both coronary artery atheroma - a narrowing of the arteries- and seawater drowning.  One of the woman’s arteries had been narrowed by 80% of their normal capacity, the autopsy found.

It was also noted that “the appellant had not been acting…as the victim’s instructor, but it emerged that they had been friends who had dived together many times before.” 

The judge ruled that Castillo had “not been in any way negligent in his actions and noted that the coronary artery atheroma which the pathologists had discovered in the deceased, was not in any case, foreseeable."

Castillo had helped Gauci to overcome all of the obstacles that she had encountered during that dive, going so far to give her some of his lead weights when she found herself unable to maintain negative buoyancy, noted the judge, concluding that had he tried to follow her directly when she had shot to the surface, "there would have been two fatalities, not one."

Castillo was assisted by lawyer Martin Fenech.