A 26-year-old man was killed and three other people were injured when a boat slammed into a channel marker in Barnegat Bay off Toms River late Saturday night, according to New Jersey State Police. The crash happened just before 11 p.m., turning a night out on the water into a deadly emergency as troopers and rescue crews rushed to the scene along the bay.
Investigators said the vessel struck a channel marker in the bay, one of the fixed navigational aids that dot the waterway to guide boaters through it. The force of the collision left one passenger dead and others badly hurt, and authorities said the circumstances that sent the boat into the marker were still being pieced together in the hours after the wreck.
The passenger who died was identified as Michael Bereheiko, 26, who was taken to a hospital but could not be saved. Two other passengers who had been on board suffered serious injuries in the crash, while state police worked to account for everyone who had been on the boat at the time of the violent collision in the dark.
The cause of the crash remained under investigation, with the New Jersey State Police leading the inquiry into how the boat came to strike the marker at night. Officials did not immediately say how fast the vessel had been traveling or what conditions were like on the bay when the collision occurred, leaving key questions about the wreck unanswered.
The fatal wreck came just a week after another deadly boat crash in the same region, when two children died after a boat struck a channel marker in Berkeley Township. In that earlier tragedy, the young girls were thrown overboard, and two adults on board managed to pull them from the water but were unable to save them after bringing them to shore.
The two crashes, coming so close together and both involving boats hitting channel markers in Barnegat Bay, have put a spotlight on safety on the busy summer waterway. State police continued to investigate the Toms River crash, and the deaths added to a grim stretch on the bay that has claimed lives across just a matter of days.