KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The weather radar in the Ride the Ducks captain’s lounge showed the storm was still about 43 miles away as the captain prepared to head to the vehicle.
Just before Stretch Duck No. 7 made its entry into the water with 31 souls on board, including the captain and driver, multiple witnesses described the weather as hot and the sky above them as sunny, which some dark clouds gathering to the northwest.
According to testimony at a preliminary hearing Wednesday and Thursday, unbeknownst to the captains and managers at Ride the Ducks, a severe thunderstorm warning had been issued and a meteorologist at a Springfield-based TV station was urging people to leave the lake immediately.
Through witnesses and evidence, attorneys for the three men charged in the killings of 17 passengers who drowned when the boat sank beneath the waves, tried to convince a Stone County judge that the onus of the tragedy should be on certain weather radars and an unusual weather event.
Kenneth “Scott” McKee, 54; Curtis P. Lanham, 39, the general manager at Ride the Ducks in Branson; and Charles V. Baltzell, 79, the operations supervisor who was acting as a manager on duty that night, face criminal charges linked to the sinking.
The defendants each face 17 counts of first-degree involuntary manslaughter, a felony. The criminal charges were announced in July by the Missouri attorney general and the Stone County prosecuting attorney.
McKee, who was steering the boat when it sank, additionally faces 12 counts of first-degree endangering the welfare of a child, also felonies. Twelve children under the age of 17 were on the duck boat when it capsized.
A manager at a nearby marina who testified on behalf of the state Wednesday said that he regularly checked about a dozen weather apps on his phone before sending out boats.
He said the July 19, 2018, storm and the wind gusts that preceded it didn’t catch him by surprise.
“That storm was predictable,” he said.
But testimony showed the employees at Ride the Ducks typically checked just one radar: Earth Networks, a private meteorological company that only showed signs of rain, not wind on its radar that day.
Sgt. Travis Hitchcock with Missouri State Highway Patrol, who interviewed McKee from his hospital bed the day after the sinking, said the captain told him when he last checked the radar before heading out, the storm still looked “a ways away.”
“He didn’t think it was going to be severe,” Hitchcock said.
Testimony from law enforcement officials who also interviewed Lanham and Baltzell showed similar approaches.
“The weather was great, and then all of a sudden it was chaos,” one officer testified Baltzell said.
The defense’s first witness, called to the stand Wednesday afternoon, gave the courtroom a schooling on storms and wind gusts.
Steven Harned, a forensic consulting meteorologist from North Carolina, said Ride the Ducks paid for its weather information through Earth Networks, which pulls its data from National Weather Service Doppler radar.
However, the defense argued through Harned’s testimony that the Ducks employees did not receive appropriate notice of the storm’s severity because of the way Earth Networks translates the National Weather Service’s information into its own radar image.
He said while the NWS Doppler can detect and show sudden wind changes, the Earth Networks display did not.
Harned described the particular July 19, 2018, storm as an “unusually severe event” which caused waves up to 3.7 feet tall.
He described how the direction of the derecho, which was moving from northwest to southeast, caused the wind to develop the highest possible waves across the section of the lake where the duck boat traversed.
The bottom line, he said: “The high winds hitting the boat were invisible to the eye and to the Doppler radar.”
He said the line of wind was miles ahead of the storm, which he said gives explanation for why the water appeared “benign” in an image taken at the beginning of the duck boat ride.
At 7 p.m., when the winds arrived and minutes before the boat began to sink, the start of the heavy rain and lightning was still eight miles from the lake, according to the radar, Harned said.
The defense also fought back against an accusation by the state that McKee should have asked his passengers to put on life jackets.
They brought forward Robert Herre, a maritime law expert from North Carolina who inspected the crash site and duck boats in 2020.
The probable cause statement filed in July accused McKee of failing in his role as a boat captain when he took the duck boat on the lake as a storm approached and by not having passengers wear flotation devices. However, a National Transportation Safety Board report examining the tragedy said life jackets can increase the risk to passengers if there is an overhead canopy.
The defense pointed to the 1999 sinking of a duck boat in Arkansas that killed 13 people. Herre said that a National Transportation Safety Board report after the sinking determined that more lives were lost because life jackets were worn as the boat sank, trapping the passengers beneath the submerged canopy of the boat.
Herre said that in his opinion, by not being instructed by McKee to don life jackets, those on his boat had a better chance to escape.
Video from on board the boat, presented as evidence in court Wednesday, captured the shouting and squeals of the guests turn to hollers and screams.
The boat started to sink at 7:09 p.m.
As water filled the boat, McKee reached for the lever to raise the windows, which he had lowered when the waves began, so people could escape. He successfully pulled one of the two before the water pushed him out and over the front of the boat, others testified in court.
The windows were marked as the escape route in the case of an emergency. Prosecutor Matt Selby argued that had both curtains been raised, as instructed in the case of severe weather, more people could have survived. Herre disagreed, saying that it wouldn’t have made much difference since the boat sank “extremely rapidly.”
“As quickly as they stood up, the water followed them up,” Herre said.
The defense also called to the stand as character witnesses two men who worked with the defendants at Ride the Ducks.
One man who previously served as head trainer for the captains. He called McKee “very safety-conscious: above and beyond.”
He added that in previous meetings and trainings, they’d discussed the involvement of the life jackets in the Arkansas tragedy and found it to be a “concern.”
When it came to weather precautions, he said, unless a storm was within 20 miles of Branson, they weren’t usually concerned. He added that they frequently canceled or delayed duck boat excursions because of weather.
Asked about Baltzell, he said “he did the right thing all the time.”
Another man who was working as a duck boat captain the day his colleague’s boat capsized, also took the stand to say the captains checked the weather “constantly” that day after noting a storm moving toward them by way of central Kansas early that morning.
In the case of bad weather, the Ride the Ducks team stayed on top of the radar, he said, “mostly to see if we could get off work early,” he said.
He said nothing looked dangerous when he approached the still-calm water that day.
“I thought we would probably be back at the dock before the storm hit,” said the captain who entered the lake several minutes ahead of McKee.
At the conclusion of testimony Thursday, attorneys for the defendants urged the judge, Alan Mark Blankenship, to drop all charges against their clients.
Blankenship gave the state until the end of the year to file a written response to the defense’s motion to dismiss the charges.
He said a court date will be set next year to announce his decision on whether to move the case forward to trial.
