Former Union College soccer player killed in unauthorized boat crash near Boston

Elizabeth Dankert was 24 years old and had spent four years playing soccer at Union College. On a Wednesday night in May, she and a group of friends were in Boston's Seaport District when they made a decision that would end her life. Around 11:30 p.m., they boarded a recreational powerboat belonging to Freedom Boat Club—a membership service that operates hundreds of locations worldwide—without permission. The club had closed for the night hours earlier. No one authorized them to take the vessel. No one knew they were there.

The boat crashed into a pier near a runway at Logan International Airport. The impact was violent enough that emergency responders had to work in darkness and on slippery rocks to pull people from the water. Boston EMS and Massachusetts Port Authority fire crews extracted four people from the rocks that night. One was in critical condition. That was Dankert. She did not survive.

Lawrence Shieh, 40, who was operating the boat, was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital along with two of Dankert's friends, both 23 years old. Their injuries were not life-threatening. They would recover. Dankert would not. The Suffolk County District Attorney's Office began investigating immediately, working to understand exactly what had happened and how a night out had become a tragedy.

Lee Gordon, a spokesperson for Brunswick Corporation, which owns Freedom Boat Club, released a statement acknowledging the unauthorized use. The vessel had been taken "well after the Club had closed for the day," he said, and the activity "did not occur within normal Club operations or established protocols governing access to and use of our vessels." The company said it was cooperating fully with authorities. There was nothing else to say on their end—the facts were stark and the responsibility was clear.

At Union College, the news landed differently. Phillip Wajda, a school spokesperson, described Dankert as "an exceptional student-athlete who had a tremendous impact during her four years" on campus. "Her passing is a profound loss for our campus community," he said. Those words, measured and formal as they had to be, could not capture what had actually been lost—a young woman in the middle of her life, someone who had mattered to people, someone whose absence would be felt in ways both obvious and quiet.

The investigation continued. Authorities worked to establish the full sequence of events, to understand how the group had accessed the boat, what they were doing, whether there were other factors at play. The boat itself was evidence now. The pier was evidence. The rocks where they pulled four people from the water were evidence. Everything pointed backward to a moment of choice—to take a boat that was not theirs, to operate it without training or authorization, to move through the night without permission. One person paid the ultimate price for that choice. Three others would carry the memory of it forward.