No one connected to the Sunshine Skyway disaster suffered longer than the man at the wheel of the ship. John Lerro was the Tampa Bay harbor pilot guiding the freighter that brought down the bridge in 1980, and though the law cleared him, the public never quite did, and his own conscience never did at all. He spent the remaining twenty-two years of his life, much of it disabled by disease, carrying the weight of a morning he could not have prevented. His friends came to call him the thirty-sixth victim.
Lerro was born in New York in 1942 and came to the sea by an unusual road; as a young man he had danced ballet, by some accounts on a notable stage, before turning to the merchant marine. He rose through the ranks to ship's master, sailing to Japan, South America, and Europe, and qualified to guide ships through the Panama Canal. In 1976 he became a harbor pilot on Tampa Bay, taking the great freighters, tankers, and passenger ships up one of the longest shipping channels in the world, the roughly fifty-eight-mile run from the Gulf to the Port of Tampa. By 1980 he had made that run, up and back, more than eight hundred times. He was, by his own quiet account, proud of his ability.
On 9 May 1980, two days from a promotion, Lerro was guiding the empty bulk freighter Summit Venture up the channel when a sudden, violent squall blinded him at the worst possible moment, knocking out his radar and hiding the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in driving rain just as he reached the critical turn. He could not see the bridge, could not see his own bow, and could not stop the light, wind-driven ship. He committed to the channel opening and missed it; the ship struck a pier, and a span of the bridge fell, carrying thirty-five people to their deaths. The recording of his distress call, ordering the bridge closed, calling for every piece of emergency equipment, is among the most harrowing documents in the bay's history.
The reckoning came fast and hard. The public wanted someone to blame, and Lerro got the hate mail and the threats; a rumor spread, and persists even now, that he had been drunk at the wheel, though he was in fact a lifelong teetotaler. But the formal inquiries, looking at the facts, did not convict him. A Florida administrative judge ruled at the end of 1980 that Lerro had not been negligent, had acted reasonably in an impossible situation, and reinstated his pilot's license, calling the disaster in effect an act of God. A federal Coast Guard inquiry found his decision to proceed in zero visibility had contributed but that many factors beyond his control, including a storm the National Weather Service had not yet warned of, had as well. The young Tampa attorney who defended him, Steve Yerrid, took on a case many thought unwinnable, won it, and became Lerro's lifelong friend; he would say that survivor's guilt took Lerro's soul and that the pilot had been made a scapegoat. In the civil courts it was the shipping company, not the pilot, that was found negligent.
Exoneration could not undo it. Within months Lerro began to lose his balance and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the disease that would slowly take his body. He left piloting, taught for a time at his old maritime academy in New York, then returned to Tampa and earned a master's degree in counseling, choosing to spend his failing strength answering crisis-hotline calls and helping others through their worst moments. He lived increasingly confined to bed and wheelchair, and he died on 31 August 2002, aged fifty-nine. He had relived that morning every day for twenty-two years. “Life throws you a lot of things that aren't bearable,” he once said, “and you have to find a way to bear them.” His widow, Laila, said that in death he could finally stop being haunted by it. His friend and lawyer put it more simply: John Lerro was the thirty-sixth victim of the Skyway, a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time.