ATLANTA – When Regina Brinson reached the middle of the aluminum walkway, she heard it crack and watched in horror as it broke just in front of her feet, plunging the elderly people ahead of her into the fast-moving water.
Soon, her portion of the gangway to the Sapelo Island ferry was in the water, too, and the current was carrying her downstream.
Brinson described her experience of the Oct. 19, 2024 tragedy that killed seven people during a news conference Wednesday. Her attorney, well-known civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, called the conference to announce his firm was filing a “multimillion-dollar” lawsuit against the companies involved in designing, engineering and building the gangway in 2022.
Charles Houston, a former pastor at Statesboro First United Methodist Church, was one of the victims of the tragedy. Houston moved to Darien in 2008 when he became chaplain for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, after serving as pastor in Statesboro prior to that. He was an ordained minister in the UMC for 40 years.
Dozens were reportedly on the gangway that afternoon, preparing to take a ferry operated by the Georgia DNR from the Marsh Landing Dock back to the mainland when the 80-foot structure buckled and collapsed.
“When people put profit over safety, you have the traumatic loss like she and her cousin Jeff Thomas had,” Crump said at the gathering outside the visitor center of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historical Park.
Thomas’ father, Brinson’s uncle, died that day.
The setting for the news conference was deliberate because Crump’s clients — 30 people who were injured or related to four of the dead — are descendants of West Africans who were enslaved on that barrier island. The tragedy unfolded during their annual Sapelo Cultural Day, a celebration of the island’s historic Gullah Geechee community.
In addition to Thomas’ family, Crump’s lawyers are representing the families of Jacqueline Crews Carter, Cynthia Gibbs and Carlotta McIntosh, who also died that day.
Crump said the lawsuit only targets companies responsible for the gangway. So far, he said, the state of Georgia is not a defendant.
Other lawyers are representing survivors of the other three who died that day — Houston, William Johnson, Jr. and Queen Welch— as part of the same lawsuit.
Houston’s daughter, Heather Houston-Meeks, is represented by the national injury law firm Morgan & Morgan, which said she was on the gangway with her father when it broke.
The firm previously represented four victims of a 2022 incident in which a boat ramp in St. Marys 75 miles south of Sapelo Island collapsed, injuring several people.
Collaborating attorney Jeffrey Goodman, a Philadelphia lawyer known for handling product liability and structural collapse cases, said the gangway should have been able to support 100 pounds per square foot but was instead designed to hold less than a third of that.
The suit was filed Tuesday in Gwinnett County. Goodman said that venue was chosen because Gwinnett is the base of one of the defendants, Centennial Contractors Enterprises, which he characterized as “right in the middle of what went wrong.”
Centennial said in a statement that the company doesn’t comment on pending legal proceedings but said the “underlying facts” of this case were still being investigated.
“Our deepest sympathies are with those who lost loved ones or were injured,” Centennial said.