A Florida real estate mogul has been slapped with a felony homicide charge over a boating accident that killed a teenager, as newly released body camera footage captured the moment he admitted to drinking “two beers” in while driving the ship.

Miami-Dade prosecutors on Thursday charged George Pino with manslaughter/reckless operation of a vessel in connection with the fatal boat wreck over Labor Day weekend 2022, according to Local10.

Pino, 52, was piloting his 29-foot boat Robalo with 14 passengers, including several teenagers, for his daughter’s 18th birthday on Sept. 4, 2022, when he hit a channel marker near Boca Chita Key – an island north of upper Florida. Keys.

The force of the crash threw all the passengers into the water and overturned the boat.

The wreck killed 17-year-old Lucy Fernandez and left soccer star Katerina Puig, 18, with a traumatic brain injury and disabled for life.

The girls were both students at Our Lady of Lourdes Academy in Miami.

Another teenager was also injured, but their name has not been released.

Body cam footage obtained by NBC 6 on Thursday shows Pino speaking with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) officers following the fatal accident.

The real estate mogul claimed to officers that he was driving the boat through the canal when another vessel caused a wave, causing him to lose control of the vessel.

He said two of the girls were “sitting in the back seat of the boat”, another “five or six” in the front and his wife in the middle, when the boat “came headfirst into the waves”.

“I looked at the girls just to make sure they were okay because they were sitting on their backs and the next thing I know, I hit the wave and tried to swing and the right side of the boat would be the left side. side of the boat, hit the pole,” Pino told the officers.

The prominent real estate developer refused to have his blood drawn voluntarily for alcohol and refused a breathalyzer test at the scene of the accident.

“No, I had two beers,” Pino told officers.

In Florida, the legal blood alcohol limit (BAC) for boaters over the age of 21 is 0.08%.

Pino assured them that he felt “perfectly the way my mind was”, but was stunned by what happened.

He added that he has “been driving boats forever” and “done this ride 1,000 times”.

The FWC said Pino had “61 empty bottles and cans of alcohol, one empty bottle of champagne and one half-consumed bottle of alcohol” on the vessel, according to an incident report obtained by NBC 6.

Investigators did not suspect that the real estate agent was intoxicated while driving the vessel.

At the time, Pino was charged with three felonies for operating the boat when it collided with a channel marker.

The Puig family also accused Pino of speeding at the time of the crash and that he and his wife, Cecilia, supplied the teenagers with alcohol throughout the day, according to Local10.

A judge ordered the Pino family to pay Puig’s family $16 million in a lawsuit in May.

Joel Denaro, the attorney representing Fernandez’s family, said the new charges against Pino on Thursday came after prosecutors re-evaluated the case and a Miami-Dade firefighter who responded to the boating accident claimed alcohol was a factor in the accident.

Pino faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.