For four days, one of the surviving Hinckley Bermuda 40s sailed up the East Coast with the wrong man at the helm. The chase that began with an empty slip in Jersey City ended in Newport harbour in an exchange of gunfire. One officer was wounded; the thief died on board.
A theft in no hurry
Pathfinder is a 1968 Bermuda 40 — a dark-blue custom yawl, sail number 4066, one of roughly 200 boats of the model still afloat. Jim Bonomo had owned her for about ten years and kept her at Liberty Harbor Marina in Jersey City, across the Hudson from Manhattan.
On the evening of Saturday, August 22, marina cameras recorded a man wandering the docks for hours, chatting with visitors. Around 9.15 pm he began rigging the yawl, unhurried, as if she were his own. By 11 pm or so, Pathfinder slipped out of the marina. After passing the Verrazzano bridge, her AIS transponder went dark.
Bonomo found out the following afternoon. "I literally pulled up to the gate... 'Where's the boat?'" he told NBC 10.
The internet posse
With the AIS off, the search ran on people. Bonomo's wife flooded sailing groups on social media; the Boat Watch network sent an alert to marinas along the East Coast, reasoning the yawl was making perhaps 25 hours of motoring from New York. By Tuesday, photos and video of both the boat and the suspect were circulating widely, and the New Jersey State Police published stills from the marina cameras.
It worked. On the morning of Wednesday, August 26, the Newport harbormaster recognised a dark-blue yawl anchored in the North Anchorage off Elm Street Pier, by Storer Park in the Point district — some 200 miles from Jersey City.
Cornered in Newport
Four Newport police officers and three harbormaster staff approached Pathfinder around 8.45 am.
Ryan Duffy, Newport Chief of Police:“The male fled below deck, ignoring commands from officers. The party armed himself with a firearm, and shots were fired. The suspect is deceased.
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The man was Brendan Norris, 27, a Newport local. One officer — a veteran of the force — took a graze wound to the leg; he was treated, released and is recovering at home. Media accounts say Norris fired first; officially, the police describe only an exchange of shots. The Rhode Island State Police and the state Attorney General's office are investigating, and the officers involved are on administrative leave, standard procedure whenever a shooting ends in a death.
Why Norris took the boat, and whether he had any connection to sailing at all, is unknown.
The boat came through
Pathfinder survived the passage from Jersey City to Newport: the yawl is intact and back with her owner — the one part of this story that ended well.
"It's a tragic end," Bonomo said. "I'm really sorry that that's how it ended."
Photo: Jared Pelland / WJAR; New Jersey State Police. Source: Scuttlebutt, Marine Industry News, Loose Cannon, WJAR.
