STARS AND STRIPES
WASHINGTON
The junior lieutenant in charge of navigating the USS Fitzgerald when it collided with a commercial vessel pleaded guilty Tuesday to dereliction of duty and acknowledged her role in the deaths of seven sailors last year.
Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock cried during her court-martial at the Washington Navy Yard. She was sentenced to forfeit half of her pay for three months – an additional month on top of the two she forfeited as her nonjudicial punishment. She also received a letter of reprimand.
“Not a day goes by where I haven’t thought about what I could have done differently,” she said. “There is nothing I can do now but take responsibility.”
Coppock said her success as an officer of the Navy was through the support of her sailors. “And then, when it mattered, I failed them,” she said through tears. “I made some tremendously bad decisions and they had to pay the price for them.”
Coppock’s unsworn statement followed the testimony of family members of sailors who died when the Fitzgerald collided with a civilian commercial vessel on June 17. The court heard about a wife who now fears water and a 3-year old who will never again share firsts with his dad, and parents who lost their faith and struggle to keep their marriage together.
“I am sad all the time,” said Terri Rigsby, whose son Dakota Rigsby was among the sailors killed. “I have persistent images in my mind of him drowning, and struggling to get out of his compartment. I am terrified he was scared and he suffered.”
Coppock was among 18 sailors who faced nonjudicial punishment in the wake of separate collisions involving two Japan-based Navy destroyers in 2017. Ten sailors died when the USS John S. McCain collided with a commercial tanker in August, just two months after the Fitzgerald collision.
Coppock was charged for failing to “communicate and coordinate with the Combat Information Center, report ship specified contacts to the commanding officer, operate safely in a high-density traffic condition and alert crew of imminent collision,” according to the charge sheet.
Capt. Charles Purnell, the Navy judge presiding over Tuesday’s court-martial, described the collision as having “dozens of failure points and dereliction of many participants – a legion, if you will, of failures.”
As officer of the deck on June 17, Coppock was responsible for the safe navigation of the ship after the commanding officer went to his quarters that evening. The ship had been conducting evolutions all day, and the crew was tired.
Coppock testified that she had been instructed by the commanding officer to maintain 20 knots, even as the ship traversed heavily trafficked waters and its main navigation radar stopped working fully about an hour before the collision.
Meanwhile, she said the “low confidence” she had in some of her fellow watch standers played into her decision not to be in closer communication with sailors in the Combat Information Center. Below deck, they are supposed to gather and communicate radar and other information to the bridge.
Coppock described an unspoken culture on the ship not to follow the standing orders to contact the commanding officer when the ship is within 6,000 yards of another ship “especially in that specific area.”
“We would have called him every five minutes,” she said.
She acknowledged losing situational awareness and not sounding the alarm to alert the crew ahead of the collision. Coppock said she was focused on something else and the rest of her crew froze.
Still, she said it was her responsibility to make sure watch standers were carrying out their duties, and she failed to do that.
Prosecutors laid blame at Coppock’s feet, saying she “chose to be blind,” never sought help from the information center, did not respond properly when she saw the Crystal on the radar 12 nautical miles from the ship and lost situational awareness. She failed to sound blasts alerting the Crystal or attempt to contact it, nor did she alert the commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Paul Hochmuth said.
When it became clear that impact was inevitable, she “failed to give the crew notice, a chance to get out of their racks, a chance to brace themselves.”
The prosecution did acknowledge that Coppock never tried to “skip out of accepting accountability for this horrible collision” or tried to blame anyone else. She cooperated with the investigations and “appears to be trying to make sure this never happens again.”
She is one of many who contributed to the deaths of these sailors and the tens of millions in damage, Hochmuth said.
“She took responsibility on herself,” he said. “That should not be lost on the court.”
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