‘I’m a fighter.’ Survivor of fatal boat crash honored at Nicklaus Children’s ball

By Michelle Marchante and David Goodhue for the MIAMI HERALD

Katy Puig vomited a gush of seawater as a boater hoisted her unconscious body out of the water, fighting the current to get her to a yacht that had come to the rescue before first responders arrived in a flotilla. Once Miami-Dade firefighters got to the chaotic scene in Biscayne Bay, she was airlifted to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital near South Miami. Katy’s mother, father and sister remember standing in a hospital hallway, watching the youngest member of their family being wheeled past them on a gurney, still unconscious.

Her sister Amanda “screamed and hit the floor,” Rudy, Katy’s dad, recalled.

Nicklaus emergency-room physicians whisked Katy into surgery less than 30 minutes after the chopper landed on the hospital’s roof on Sept. 4, 2022, Sunday night of the Labor Day weekend. Rudy said a firefighter’s recounting of what happened immediately after the boat crash — that her body reacted to the seawater enough to make her retch, that witnesses said she made some movement in the bay — helped the neurosurgeons decide to operate. “We were just in shock. A daze,” Rudy said. “It’s like the worst day in your life times 10.” Katerina “Katy” Puig was one of 12 teenage girls — she was 17 at the time — ejected from a boat that capsized after slamming into a concrete channel marker in the bay on a clear summer evening, around 6:30 p.m. A prominent South Florida businessman — George Pino — was operating his 29-foot Robalo at the time of the crash, which killed Katy’s 17-year-old best friend and classmate from Our Lady of Lourdes Academy, Lucy Fernandez.

Katy’s family paced and prayed in a small room, waiting for the three-hour surgery to be over. In the hospital lobby, about 200 people – friends and family – kept vigil, praying Katy would pull through. Surgeons removed the right part of her skull and a blood clot that was preventing blood flow into the brain, blocking it from receiving life-saving oxygen and nutrients. How quickly Katy made it to the hospital, and how fast she underwent surgery, “makes a big difference in recovery when you have an injury like this that causes bleeding in the brain,” said Dr. John Ragheb, a pediatric neurosurgeon who is chief of surgery at Nicklaus. Ragheb did not operate on Katy, but oversaw her treatment.

No one, including the doctors, knew what recovery would look like for Katy, the high school senior who had been captain of her Lourdes soccer team and a likely Division 1 recruit. She spent nearly two months at Nicklaus before being released on Oct. 31, Halloween. “It was day-to-day from there,” said her mom Kathya. Three years later, Katy is still fighting to recover. She struggles to speak. She uses a wheelchair. She can eat by herself now, though she needs help cutting her food. But, she’s made progress.

Less than a year after the crash, Katy passed a swallowing test. Eleven months after the crash, in August 2023, doctors removed her feeding tube. And the former high school math whiz — a Florida Bright Futures Scholarships recipient — is getting ready to apply to Florida International University, where she hopes to study accounting. “Katy is an inspiration to so many in our community with her transformational recovery and unwavering resilience over the last three years. Her story represents hope, an important key to the healing journey, along with the expert care our team at Nicklaus Children delivers to every child,” Matthew A. Love, president and CEO of Nicklaus Children’s Health System, said in a statement.

#KatyStrong

Katy shared her recovery Saturday evening through a video that was played at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Foundation’s 18th annual Diamond Ball. The Foundation is the 75-year-old hospital’s fundraising arm. Katy grasped the hands of her brother and sister as she watched the video play inside the ballroom at the JW Marriott Marquis Miami in downtown Miami, surrounded by her parents, speech therapist Lauren Healy and her former Nicklaus doctor, Ragheb. Afterward, a teary-eyed Katy flexed her bicep as the crowd gave her a standing ovation — “Katy Strong!” she said into the microphone, repeating two words that have become a mantra for her and her loved ones. “We want to thank Nicklaus Children’s Hospital for what they did for Katy, they brought her back to life and they cared for her,” Rudy told the crowd Saturday after the video. “The nurses, the doctors, the therapists, everyone treated her with so much love and kindness, and she’s come a long way.”

“I am very proud of myself for all the work I’ve done since the accident,” Katy told the Miami Herald a few days before the gala. “I have the best support system ever,” she said, referring not only to her family but to her former Lourdes classmates and teammates, some of whom were on the boat.

Community support has been critical for her recovery. Family, friends and others helped raise more than $80,000 during the second annual Katy Strong Whiffle Ball Classic tournament to help pay for Katy’s medical care. “I wish I could express how grateful I am for them,” Katy said. Her parents point to her prowess at soccer — a sport she started at age 3, topping out as one of the state’s best players — as a big factor in helping her heal. The doctors, too, said her athleticism has aided her recovery. “That’s what her teammates say, ‘If one person could get through this, it would be Katy,” her father said. Katy doesn’t remember anything from the night of the crash. “I’ve heard the stories,” she said, a somber tone in her voice.

The boat crash

The evening of the crash, Rudy had just arrived at Flanigan’s in Pinecrest to watch Louisiana State University play Florida State, where Katy’s older siblings — her sister Amanda and her brother Rudy Jr. — had attended. Rudy Jr. was in Baton Rouge watching the game; Amanda was with Rudy. What Rudy didn’t know was that moments before he got to the restaurant, Pino had just crashed his boat into Channel Marker 15 in Cutter Bank, the last marker before the Ocean Reef Club. Boaters in the channel dove into the bay to get to the girls, pulling them out of the water and onto nearby boats. At least two of the boaters — a former lifeguard and a nurse — administered CPR to Lucy, who had been trapped under Pino’s boat and was unconscious. Katy and 17-year-old Isabella Rodriguez also were unconscious. George Pino and his wife Cecilia had taken the 11 girls to Elliott Key, a popular island for boaters, to celebrate their daughter’s 18th birthday. They were heading back to Ocean Reef, the exclusive resort in Key Largo, where they had dinner reservations for her birthday party. On one of the boats was Katy’s friend Coco Aguilar, whose father is good friends with Rudy. Coco’s phone was at the bottom of the channel, so she used one of the boater’s phones to call her father. He immediately called Rudy.

“Our daughters were on the boat,” Mario Aguilar alerted Rudy. Rudy and Amanda raced to Ocean Reef, where Rudy was told Katy was being transported. By the time they got to Florida City, Rudy got another call: Katy was being flown to Jackson South Medical Center in South Miami-Dade. He turned around. As he neared Jackson South, another call came in. Paramedics had choppered his daughter to Nicklaus Children’s. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade firefighters choppered Lucy to the trauma center at HCA Florida Kendall Hospital, where she died the next day. The families remain close, bound by the boating tragedy.

Outpouring of support

Rudy and Amanda met Kathya at Nicklaus, where Katy would remain in a medically induced coma for two months. Prayers and messages came in from all over, including from country music star Zac Brown, actor Kevin James, soccer icon David Beckham and the Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro, Nikola Jovic and coach Erik Spoelstra.

Her soccer teammates would dedicate the season to her, creating videos on and off the field so she wouldn’t miss what would have been her senior year. Rudy said they received so many small bottles of holy water that “we could have bathed Katy in it for weeks.” “The love. The kindness. The power of prayer. It’s a miracle,” Rudy said. While Katy was at Nicklaus, Kathya and Rudy took turns sleeping there. “You never knew when she was going to wake up,” Kathya said. “Plus, we weren’t going to leave her anyway.” The staff of nurses, doctors and therapists became like an extended family to the Puigs. “I cried for a week after I left,” Kathya said. “Even when we left, they were there for us, and they still are.” Nurses braided Katy’s hair every day, bathing and feeding her. Therapists sang to her. Thor, a dog that visits patients at hospitals across South Florida with his handler Alexandra Ramos, snuggled up to Katy in her hospital bed. When nurses removed 19 staples from her head, they played Zac Brown Band’s “Chicken Fried,” her favorite song at the time. The day she was extubated, the nurses wore cherry-themed compression socks to match with Katy. The Nicklaus team taught the parents how to care for Katy at home, including crushing her pills and gingerly placing them in her feeding tube. “They’re incredible. Whatever it is they do, they have to keep doing it,” Kathya said. “You get thrown into this situation, and you don’t know what to do. But they are warm. They are home.”

Adriana Vourakis, a registered nurse at Nicklaus who cared for Katy, considers herself to be one of Katy’s “biggest cheerleaders.” She told the Herald in a statement that “watching Katy’s journey over the past three years has been nothing short of remarkable.” “She has made tremendous progress, and every step forward has been a testament to her strength, resilience, and the incredible love that surrounds her,” Vourakis said.

Finding strength in faith

On Oct. 31, 2022, Katy was discharged from Nicklaus and headed for Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital in Jacksonville, for months of intense physical therapy. She stayed there until January, when she went back to Nicklaus, where doctors put back the piece of skull they removed the night of the crash. Katy stayed at Nicklaus for 10 days. She returned to Brooks, where she stayed until March. From then, she briefly received care at the Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center for The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis on the campus of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and is continuing rehabilitation therapy at Baptist Hospital in Homestead. Healy, the speech therapist, describes Katy’s progress as a “night and day” difference from the early days of the crash. Last week, during a Herald visit to her home, Katy softly sang along to Thomas Rhett’s “Life Changes,” the country music fan’s new favorite tune. She and her mom showed off their matching white nails. Katy, soon to be 21, considers her recovery “a miracle” and like the rest of her family, credits God for saving her.

Her faith, Katy said, has helped her “tremendously.”

If Katy “were 71 instead of 17, and she had this brain injury, she would not have survived, she would not have been offered treatment and she wouldn’t be here today,” Ragheb, the Nicklaus neurosurgeon, said, noting that doctors at children hospitals look for “subtle signs” of recovery in pediatric patients. “And Katy showed those kind of changes early on,” he said. In Katy’s case, her first sign of recovery happened the day after her surgery, Rudy said. Her foot slightly moved. Minimal. But enough to give hope. “We’re so lucky she got a second chance,” Kathya said. “We didn’t know if we would hear her voice again.” Later that September, Nicklaus medical team decided it was time to try and let Katy breathe on her own, not on a breathing machine. Her parents waited outside, praying with the hospital’s chaplain. In the midst of the prayer, Katy coughed. “They told us, if she coughed, that means that it worked,” Rudy said, recalling how everyone broke out into cheers.

Shortly after surgery, Katy was able to follow certain commands, such as to blink once, twice and so on, her mom said. Kathya still tears up talking about Katy’s ordeal, the slow road to recovery and how their lives were shattered that evening, a day that had begun with joy, a celebration with her best friends, many of whom grew up on the waterways in Coral Gables and Coconut Grove. A civil suit filed by Katy’s parents resulted in a multimillion-dollar settlement against the Pinos; George Pino is scheduled to stand trial on two felony criminal counts in June.

Katy’s parents say they’re indebted to God that their daughter, despite a lifetime of challenges ahead, is alive. As they watch Katy slowly improve, they’ve been humbled by her perseverance. “It starts and begins with her, and I think she sets the pace for us as a family. If it wasn’t for her attitude, if it wasn’t for her dedication to getting herself better and sticking to it — not that we would give up — but it’s been hard and challenging, and she sticks to it, no matter what,” Kathya said. For Katy, her key to success is faith, determination and a goal to be “always positive,” lessons she learned early on in soccer. “I’m a fighter,” she said.