Two New Jersey men who owned a 25-foot boat that capsized in the Hudson River, killing two people, including a 7-year-old boy, were arrested Thursday and charged with Prosecutors say misconduct and negligence caused the deaths.

The men, Richard Cruz and Jaime Pinilla Gomez, took paying customers on boat rides on the ship despite lacking the required credentials and certifications, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said. Mr. Cruz charged about $200 an hour for the tours, prosecutors said.

When the boat capsized, prosecutors said, there were more people on board than allowed and the boat was traveling “at high speed” on a day of high winds and heavy seas.

The ship, named “Stimulus Money,” was carrying 13 people after a tour around the Statue of Liberty on July 12, 2022, when it overturned and threw all the passengers overboard, according to a criminal complaint. Lindelia Vasquez, 47, and Julian Vasquez, 7, were trapped under the boat and drowned, the complaint said. Several others, including a 51-year-old woman, were hospitalized.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Thursday that federal regulations and safety protocols are in place to protect passengers.

“The defendants are alleged to have ignored these regulations, recklessly disregarded safety protocols, operated the vessel at an unsafe speed in dangerous conditions and overloaded the vessel with too many passengers on board,” he said. “And the outcome was tragic: a young boy and a woman became trapped under the ship and drowned after the ship capsized.”

Mr. Cruz and Mr. Gomez were each charged with misconduct and neglect of a ship’s officer resulting in death, which prosecutors said carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

A lawyer for Mr. Cruz, Kristoff Williams, with the Federal Defenders of New York, declined to comment on the allegations Thursday evening. A lawyer for Mr. Gomez, Thomas H. Nooter, also had no comment.

A sign at the helm of Stimulus Money stated that the ship’s maximum capacity was 12 people, prosecutors said.

Under regulations, a ship carrying more than six passengers can only be operated if it has undergone a valid inspection, prosecutors said. The boat’s owner and captain, 32-year-old Cruz, had purchased the vessel about three months earlier and never requested or received proper inspections, they said.

Mr. Gomez, 25, who was piloting the boat, had “insufficient experience” and operated it in a “dangerous manner, including rapidly accelerating one of the vessel’s engines just before capsizing,” prosecutors said.

On the summer day when the boat capsized, a small craft advisory was in effect for New York Harbor at the mouth of the Hudson River, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s New York office. According to the group, there were wind gusts of 15 to 20 kilometers per hour.

According to the complaint, after the tour, the ship was traveling north on the Hudson River on its way back to Carteret, NJ, and capsized just north of Pier 79 in Midtown Manhattan.

Captain Anthony Ryan, of the New York Waterway ferry company, was preparing to depart the dock on his boat, Garden State, for its afternoon route when he was alerted to the emergency.

The scene he saw, he said days later in an interview, was one he would never forget.

“We see people waving their arms and they were in distress,” he said at the time. “They were panicking, they were scared.” He said he heard shouts in Spanish, “and just a lot of shouting.”

Ms. Vasquez had lived in Elizabeth, N.J., for about 20 years, having moved there from Medellín, Colombia, a niece, Lina Vasquez, said in an interview shortly after her aunt’s death. Police said at the time that both victims were of Colombian descent; it was unclear whether they were related.

Lindelia Vasquez worked as a manager at Kanela’s Lounge, a restaurant and catering venue in downtown Elizabeth, and had a cheerful, managerial personality, her niece said. She had three children – two young adults and a teenager – who were in the boat with her and survived.

Shafiqah Hudson was looking for a job in early June 2014, switching between Twitter and email, when she noticed a strange hashtag trending on the social media platform: #EndFathersDay.

The posters claimed to be black feminists, but they had ridiculous handles like @NayNayCan’tStop and @CisHate and @LatrineWatts; they stated that they wanted to abolish Father’s Day because it was a symbol of patriarchy and oppression, among other nonsense.

They didn’t seem like real people, Mrs. Hudson thought, but parodies of black women, making ridiculous statements. Like Mrs. Hudson told Forbes magazine in 2018“Anyone with half the sense that God gave a cold bowl of oatmeal could see that these were not feminist sentiments.”

But the hashtag remained popular, sending the Twitter community into a frenzy, and the conservative news media picked it up, citing it as an example of feminism gone seriously off the rails, and “a beautiful illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.” as Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review, tweeted at the time. Tucker Carlson committed an entire segment from his show to mocking it.

So Ms. Hudson set out to battle what she quickly realized was a coordinated action by trolls. She created her own hashtag, #YourSlipIsShowing, a Southernism that seemed particularly useful, about calling out someone who thinks they present themselves flawlessly.

She started collecting the messages from the trolls below and encouraged others to do so and block the fake accounts. Her Twitter community took up the mission, including black feminists and scientists I’Nasah Crockettwho did some research of his own and discovered that #EndFathersDay was a hoax, as she told Slate in 2019organized on 4chan, the dark community of web forums populated by right-wing hate groups.

Twitter, Ms. Hudson and others said, was largely unresponsive. Nevertheless, their actions were effective. #EndFathersDay was all but silenced within a few weeks, though more and more fake accounts popped up over the years and Mrs. Hudson kept calling them out, like an endless game of Whac-a-Mole.

Yet #EndFathersDay turned out to be more than an absurd joke. It was a well-structured disinformation operation, a kind of test balloon, as Bridget Todd, a digital activist who interviewed Ms. Hudson in 2020 for her podcast “There Are No Girls on the Internet,” put it for subsequent actions: notably the election disruption campaigns launched in 2016 started with tactics that, as Senate hearings showed, were adopted by Russian agents. In retrospect, Ms. Hudson’s efforts provided an early and effective bulwark against what continues to be a threat to democracy.

“It should be an affirmation,” Ms. Hudson told Slate. “But instead it was disturbing and alarming. No one wants to be right about how much real danger we are all in, even if you saw it coming.”

Ms. Hudson, a freelance writer who had worked in nonprofits but devoted herself to Twitter activism starting in 2014, died Feb. 15 at an extended-stay hotel in Portland, Oregon. She was 46 years old.

Her brother, Salih Hudson, confirmed her death but did not know the cause. She suffered from Crohn’s disease, he said, and breathing problems. However, her followers knew from her posts that she had long had Covid and had recently been diagnosed with cancer. And that she had no money to pay for her care. Many volunteered to help.

At her death, her community mourned their lossand expressed frustration and anger that Ms. Hudson had never been paid by the tech companies whose platforms she controlled or properly credited by scientists and news organizations calling #YourSlipIsShowing, and that she had not received the health care she so desperately needed.

“The world owed Fiqah more than she gave her,” Mikki Kendall, cultural critic and author of “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot” (2020), said by phone. Ms. Kendall is one of many black feminists who have adopted Ms. Hudson’s mission and befriended her on Twitter, now called X. “The world owes Fiqah to never let this happen to anyone else again. Sadly, she is part of a long tradition of black activist women dying impoverished. Those who die sick, alone and afraid. Because we love an activist until he needs something.”

Shafiqah Amatullah Hudson was born on January 10, 1978 in Columbia, SC. ​​Her father, Caldwell Hudson, was a martial arts instructor and author. Her mother, Geraldine (Thompson) Hudson, was a computer engineer. The couple divorced in 1986 and Shafiqah grew up with her mother and brother, mainly in Florida, where she attended Palm Beach County School of the Arts, a magnet school.

Shafiqah received a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY in 2000, majoring in Africana studies with a minor in political science. After graduating, she moved to New York City and worked at several nonprofit organizations.

She was new in town and lonely. She found community on blogs and social media sites, including Twitter, which she joined in 2009. (She chose as her avatar an image of Edna Mode, the imperious fashion maven from “The Incredibles.”) And like many black women on that platform, she was mocked and harassed. She received rape and death threats, she told Ms. Todd.

In addition to her brother, Mrs. Hudson is survived by her father and her sisters, Kali Newnan, Charity Jones and Mosinah Hudson. Geraldine Hudson died in 2019.

In the final months of her life, Ms. Hudson posted about her deteriorating health and her fears that she would be unable to pay for her care or housing. Due to her disability she could not work.

She moved to Portland, her brother said, because the climate was better for her breathing problems. But she was unable to obtain health insurance. Doctors had discovered that the painful fibroids she was suffering from were cancerous. She needed money for more biopsies and for transportation to the hospital. Her Twitter community, as always, contributed. She didn’t ask her family for help.

“She was very private and very proud,” Margaret Haynes, a cousin, said by phone, adding that she had spoken to Mrs. Hudson a few weeks before her death. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing well. If I need anything, you’ll be the first to know.’”

Still, on February 9, she told her followers: “I feel like I’m meowing into the void. And it’s raining. And I’m just trying not to drown.”

February 7 had been a rough day. Ms. Hudson was dizzy and in pain, she wrote. Sensing her mortality, she reported her decision to be single and not have children – “to be an aunt and not a mother,” as she put it – and recalled a conversation she had with a young relative. , and portray it with characteristic humor.

“Suppose life on some plane of existence is a dinner at a restaurant,” she explained, then continued, “Let’s say the life Auntie (I) has chosen is the salad option. A life without partner(s) or own Littles. Let’s say the Soup option comes with Littles, and maybe a partner. But you can only choose one. Like it. If you choose the Family Soup, you cannot get the Singlehood Autonomy Salad. ”

She quoted a bit along these lines and then concluded, “Aunt Fiqah chose the salad. Because she only likes soup. And no one can ever convince her that she REALLY likes soup. Or will come. Or that she should. Soup should be enjoyed with love and enthusiasm. What if it’s not possible? Have the salad.”

Mrs. Hudson died eight days later.

Alain Delaqueriere research contributed.

Albert K. Butzel, a fearless lawyer who, by defeating massive public works projects that endangered the environment, benefited millions of beleaguered New York City subway riders and countless numbers of striped bass returning to spawn in the Hudson River , died January 26 in Seattle. He was 85.

He died after a fall at an assisted living facility where he was being treated for Parkinson's disease, his daughter Kyra Butzel said.

As wispy and unprepossessing as he could be caustic and arrogant, Mr. Butzel (pronounced BUTTS-uhl) was considered a shrewd legal tactician who was instrumental in blocking Westway, a government-funded landfill and highway project of $4 billion, first proposed in 1971. , which would have run along the Hudson River, from the Battery North to West 42nd Street.

He also helped bury a plan by Consolidated Edison to build the world's largest hydroelectric power plant. Storm King Mountainin the Hudson Highlands.

“Westway would never have been defeated without Al,” Mitchell Bernard, who worked with him on the legal strategy and is now chief counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. “Whatever you think of Westway's merits, it was a remarkable victory for citizen initiatives.”

After spending 15 years fighting Storm King and eight years litigating Westway, Mr. Butzel told The New Yorker in 1997: “My history is a history of the Hudson River.”

However, he was not an obstructionist who was not in my backyard.

When Westway was declared legally dead in 1985, he led a coalition that helped transform abandoned piers into what is now Hudson River Park, a riverside greenway and boulevard stretching from Pier 97 in the Clinton neighborhood to the West Side to Pier 25 in Tribeca. .

“After 150 years, the waterfront has once again become the public domain,” Mr. Butzel wrote in the foreword to “Lost Waterfront: The Decline and Rebirth of Manhattan's Western Shore” (2007), by Shelley Seccombe, “and an extraordinary one. ”

While former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo famously predicted that the Westway controversy, feverish as it was, would eventually fade away “like a walnut in the batter of eternity,” each of Mr. Butzel's successful legal challenges to the Hudson River resonate. beyond current events.

The 1965 ruling in the Storm King case, filed by the conservation group Scenic Hudson, was hailed at the time as the birth of environmental law. It was one of the first court decisions to grant citizens legal authority to sue to enforce environmental protection regulations.

Westway's defeat was a sign of the survival of grassroots political power and of continued resistance to Robert Moses' bulldozer diplomacy in building public works.

And thanks to a second front of transit advocates and New York politicians in Washington, the city government was given the authority to swap about $1 billion in federal funds already earmarked for Westway to replace the city's rickety subway and bus system. subsidize the city.

At one point, the fate of both projects depended on the risks they posed to the breeding grounds of the striped bass, later named the official saltwater fish of New York State. The fish live in coastal waters and return each spring to spawn in the freshwater of the Hudson.

Westway was doomed when it became clear during the trial that official environmental impact statements had inexcusably and even fraudulently belittled the impact on the fish farm of dumping 220 hectares of landfill into the river to support the Westway, part of which would have been tunnelled underwater. park landscape.

Westway was ultimately defeated by homegrown environmentalists and enemies of further development. They spent a decade campaigning against an implacable but ill-prepared bloc of New York's political and business establishment.

Mr. Butzel later served as chairman of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of 35 environmental and community groups that pushed for the creation of the Hudson River Park.

The coalition successfully proposed that a state authority be created to build and then maintain the park by obtaining fees and other revenue from private real estate development along the river, rather than making it subject to annual fluctuations in the city budget. In 1998, the state legislature created the Hudson River Park Trust to design, build, operate and maintain the park using a variety of revenue sources.

Mr. Butzel's support for even a development to help subsidize the park caused an irreparable rift with one of his former allies, Marcy Benstock, whose Clean Air Campaign was one of the groups Mr. Butzel had represented against Westway and which himself was one of the most important leaders. player in the defeat of the project. But he had the upper hand.

“There seemed to be no argument he couldn't win, no trap he couldn't escape, no opponent he couldn't outsmart,” Charles Komanoff, a former urban environmental analyst, wrote last year in the online magazine Citizens Union . , Gotham Gazette. “Not only was he the smartest man in the room, he was also the most effective.”

Alfred Kahn Butzel was born on October 1, 1938 in Birmingham, Michigan, north of Detroit. His father, Martin Butzel, was a lawyer. His mother, Rosalie (Kahn) Butzel, was the daughter of the Detroit architect Albert Kahn and was active in civic and philanthropic groups.

After attending Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Mr. Butzel graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in English in 1960 and from Harvard Law School in 1961.

That same year he married Brenda Fay Sosland, a clinical social worker, who survives him along with their daughters, Laura and Kyra Butzel; four grandchildren; and his brother Leo. Another brother, John, died earlier.

After law school, Mr. Butzel joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Garrison, where Lloyd Garrison recruited him to the law firm's pro bono representation of Scenic Hudson. In 1971, he formed a legal partnership with Peter AA Berle, who would later become the state environmental commissioner.

Mr. Butzel told the New York Times in 2000 that as the son of a lawyer, he “felt obligated to be a lawyer, but that wasn't anything I desired.”

“It scared me; it's so confrontational,” he added.

However, Mr. Bernard, who was mentored by Mr. Butzel during the court battle over Westway, described him as “an unorthodox and brilliant lawyer, hardworking, tenacious and dedicated.”

Mr. Butzel later participated in campaigns to preserve open space on Governors Island and build Brooklyn Bridge Park.

While working in New York, he lived in an apartment on Park Avenue, “thanks in some measure to family money, surrounded by antiques and paintings,” The Times wrote in a profile of him.

After litigating most of the case against Westway, Mr. Butzel left his law practice full-time to pursue his passion for writing. He published several short stories and a novel, demonstrating a talent for prose previously reflected in his lawyer's work.

“His briefs were stories that brought technical scientific and legal evidence to life, giving it a human face,” Mr Bernard said. “And extremely modest. I have never known such a good litigator as him, who personally hated litigation as much as he did.”