Tina Watson dead on the ocean floor in October 2003. Husband gets a year in jail for manslaughter
News.Com.au
Family believes Tina Watson's dive death was murder
By Christine Flatley
June 05, 2009 04:56pm
“The family of an American woman who died while scuba diving on her honeymoon still believe she was murdered, even after prosecutors accepted her killer's plea of manslaughter.
David Gabriel Watson, 32, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years' jail today after pleading guilty in the Supreme Court in Brisbane to killing his new wife, Christina (Tina) while scuba diving in north Queensland in October 2003.He had been charged with murder, to which he pleaded not guilty, but Crown prosecutors accepted the plea to the lesser charge.Prosecutor Brendan Campbell told the court the manslaughter plea was accepted on the basis that Watson had failed in his duty as Tina's dive buddy by not giving her emergency oxygen.Outside court after their daughter's killer was jailed, Tina's father Tommy Thomas expressed the family's disbelief at the manslaughter sentence."I'm sure that the entire Australian nation as well as our country back home shares in the shock at what we've just seen, because it's a total injustice ... it's ludicrous," he said."Today he (Watson) was allowed to take the easy way out.
"This is in no way, shape or form a beginning to get justice for our daughter."It's an embarrassment to everyone involved."We believe that Gabe Watson murdered our daughter."Mr. Thomas, Tina's sister Alanda and friend Amanda Phillips flew from Alabama to Australia this week to be in court for Watson's sentencing.Watson's new wife, Kim Lewis, was also in court.During the hearing the court was told Watson allowed Tina to sink to the ocean floor without making any serious attempt to retrieve her, and that he did not inflate her buoyancy vest or remove weights from her belt."He virtually extinguished any chance of her survival," Mr. Campbell said.Watson married Tina in a ceremony described by her friends as her dream wedding in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 11, 2003.Eleven days later, a dive instructor found her lying on the bottom of the ocean during a week-long Great Barrier Reef scuba-diving trip off the coast of Townsville.A coronial inquest into her death heard a fellow diver saw Gabe Watson engaged in an underwater "bearhug" with his petite wife, after which the bubble-wrap salesman headed for the surface while his wife fell to the ocean floor.Coroner David Glasgow formally charged Watson with murder in June 2008 and the American voluntarily returned to Australia in mid-May 2009.The Supreme Court was told on today Watson was an experienced diver who had been trained in rescuing panicked divers.
Watson told police Tina had knocked his mask off and then had sunk too quickly for him to retrieve her.
But the Crown rejected this explanation, saying it would not have been possible for her to sink rapidly.
Mr. Thomas today said the family would consider lodging an appeal.
Watson will serve 12 months behind bars before he is released on a suspended sentence.”
One can only hope the other inmates use Gabe as a Boy Toy.
School of American Ballet students
The New York Times June 3, 2009
Dance Review School of American Ballet
With Each Youthful Step, Discoveries and Transformations
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
Dancers on the cusp of professional careers can be an awkward batch. Typically heavy on energy and physical daring but light on experience and emotional depth, they require just the right sort of work, one that highlights their abilities while celebrating — or at least not ignoring — that they are only youngsters, still figuring themselves out as people, let alone artists.
There may be no better ballet for these purposes than “Serenade,” whose air of discovery, transformation and mystery belies its age. Balanchine choreographed it in 1934, the year that he and Lincoln Kirstein opened the School of American Ballet. On Monday night, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, the school celebrated its 75th birthday with a gala wrap-up of its annual workshop performances. The Balanchine triple bill opened with “Serenade,” which was created during rehearsals with his early students.
Balanchine began, with those students, to forge a new American style of ballet. And “Serenade,” so redolent with untold stories and set to Tchaikovsky’s stirring, gathering score, is a ballet about beginnings. It is always exciting to see the curtain rise on a tableau of women who then morph into dancers; to see it done by students is especially thrilling. Their entire lives, virtually, have been pointed toward this goal, itself only a beginning.
On Monday Emilie Gerrity in particular shone in the Dark Angel role. Adam Chavis, who danced the waltz with the sparkling Lauren Lovette, seems well on his way to becoming a sure partner. But more captivating than any single performance was the ardor with which the members of the ensemble danced, hurling themselves through the air or to the floor, flinging arms around one another as only young girls do. (Credit must also go to the conductor Martin West and the rich, clear world created by his orchestra.)
Then came the very young, in the “Ballabile des Enfants” from “Harlequinade,” a colorful, confectionary swirl of polichinelles, pierrots and scaramouches, set to Riccardo Drigo. These dancers, 9 to 15, are in that happy period when bobbles can be as charming as rock-steady technique (though not for their eagle-eyed instructors). Yet this isn’t an exercise in cute. It makes clear how seriously Balanchine took children on the stage, and how his choreography pushes them just beyond what they think their limits are.
One of the best things about workshop performances is how the faculty members who staged these ballets (Suki Schorer, Garielle Whittle, Susan Pilarre) bow with their students. They congratulate their charges even as the audience acknowledges the teachers and the fact that the School of American Ballet is, first and foremost, a place of learning.
The night ended with “Stars and Stripes,” the consummate, and ridiculous, rousing closer in which Balanchine, responding to the Sousa score (adapted and orchestrated by Hershy Kay), channeled marching bands, cheerleaders and military maneuvers.
Angelica Generosa, just 15 and performing on two weeks’ rehearsal because of another dancer’s injury, was a fleet, sure-footed Liberty Bell, shining in the good and elegant hands of Taylor Stanley. He has a City Ballet apprenticeship awaiting him, and she, you suspect, along with many of her peers, will someday soon step into a future just as promising.
Comment: I made it into the production of Serenade during the Workshop my final year at SAB when another girl became injured. Not that I wasn’t a great dancer, I was and am, it’s that they said I was just too adventuresome for my own good.
The New York Times June 3, 2009
Dance Review School of American Ballet
With Each Youthful Step, Discoveries and Transformations
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
Dancers on the cusp of professional careers can be an awkward batch. Typically heavy on energy and physical daring but light on experience and emotional depth, they require just the right sort of work, one that highlights their abilities while celebrating — or at least not ignoring — that they are only youngsters, still figuring themselves out as people, let alone artists.
There may be no better ballet for these purposes than “Serenade,” whose air of discovery, transformation and mystery belies its age. Balanchine choreographed it in 1934, the year that he and Lincoln Kirstein opened the School of American Ballet. On Monday night, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, the school celebrated its 75th birthday with a gala wrap-up of its annual workshop performances. The Balanchine triple bill opened with “Serenade,” which was created during rehearsals with his early students.
Balanchine began, with those students, to forge a new American style of ballet. And “Serenade,” so redolent with untold stories and set to Tchaikovsky’s stirring, gathering score, is a ballet about beginnings. It is always exciting to see the curtain rise on a tableau of women who then morph into dancers; to see it done by students is especially thrilling. Their entire lives, virtually, have been pointed toward this goal, itself only a beginning.
On Monday Emilie Gerrity in particular shone in the Dark Angel role. Adam Chavis, who danced the waltz with the sparkling Lauren Lovette, seems well on his way to becoming a sure partner. But more captivating than any single performance was the ardor with which the members of the ensemble danced, hurling themselves through the air or to the floor, flinging arms around one another as only young girls do. (Credit must also go to the conductor Martin West and the rich, clear world created by his orchestra.)
Then came the very young, in the “Ballabile des Enfants” from “Harlequinade,” a colorful, confectionary swirl of polichinelles, pierrots and scaramouches, set to Riccardo Drigo. These dancers, 9 to 15, are in that happy period when bobbles can be as charming as rock-steady technique (though not for their eagle-eyed instructors). Yet this isn’t an exercise in cute. It makes clear how seriously Balanchine took children on the stage, and how his choreography pushes them just beyond what they think their limits are.
One of the best things about workshop performances is how the faculty members who staged these ballets (Suki Schorer, Garielle Whittle, Susan Pilarre) bow with their students. They congratulate their charges even as the audience acknowledges the teachers and the fact that the School of American Ballet is, first and foremost, a place of learning.
The night ended with “Stars and Stripes,” the consummate, and ridiculous, rousing closer in which Balanchine, responding to the Sousa score (adapted and orchestrated by Hershy Kay), channeled marching bands, cheerleaders and military maneuvers.
Angelica Generosa, just 15 and performing on two weeks’ rehearsal because of another dancer’s injury, was a fleet, sure-footed Liberty Bell, shining in the good and elegant hands of Taylor Stanley. He has a City Ballet apprenticeship awaiting him, and she, you suspect, along with many of her peers, will someday soon step into a future just as promising.
Comment: I made it into the production of Serenade during the Workshop my final year at SAB when another girl became injured. Not that I wasn’t a great dancer, I was and am, it’s that they said I was just too adventuresome for my own good.
Crown v. Watson: When I heard yesterday morning that the guy copped to manslaughter, I was surprised to say the least. From someone who is in a family victimized by murder (grandfather killed 11 1/2 years ago), the guy must've got himself a very good lawyer. They should have called you into the inquest to be an expert on SCUBA homocide attempts, or at least on how someone might try to kill someone else by forced drowning while in SCUBA. But now since the guy copped, they can't do anything else. The guy who killed my grandfather, he pled down to murder 2, and is seven years into a 30-year sentence, and he won't get an early release.
ReplyDeleteSAB recital: I remember watching my cousin's first or second recital for Attitudes by Aimee, and she did pretty good. She started rather late for a girl in ballet. Though she is pretty small for our family, she was much larger body-size-wise than her classmates, who were mostly stick-figures. Of course, she had just turned 15 or 16, while the other girls in that group were like 12 or 13. Could you in a future posting reflect on your first recital?