What EMTs Found on the Montauk Boat Where an Upper East Side Woman Died

Martha Nolan-O’Slatarra was 33 when she was found dead aboard a docked boat on the East End a year ago, and there’s still no official cause of death. The medics who worked on her that night wrote down what they saw.

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The Montauk Fire Department’s patient care record, obtained by the New York Post on the anniversary of her death, describes a woman who was cool to the touch inside a warm cabin, with purpling around her lips and under her nail beds and dried blood in her mouth and on her head and chest. There was blood on the floor near her body. The first EMT aboard noted blood that appeared to be coming from the back of her head while repositioning it to open her airway and start resuscitation. The record documented no active bleeding and no obvious source of trauma, and stated she was unresponsive the entire time medics were on the boat, which was tied up at the Montauk Yacht Club.

The record also refers to an unidentified “additional male” who was present when she went into cardiac arrest, and who told EMTs he had been in bed with Nolan-O’Slatarra and called 911 when he couldn’t wake her. Boat owner Christopher Durnan is the only person who was previously confirmed as being aboard. He was reportedly seen running naked down the dock around midnight yelling for help, and his lawyers have said he was undressed because he was covered in her vomit. The EMT record doesn’t mention vomit.

Those details are surfacing now because her family has gone to court. Nolan-O’Slatarra’s mother, Elma Geraldine Nolan, and Manhattan attorney Marcello de Peralta, acting together as temporary administrators of her estate, filed a summons with notice in Manhattan Supreme Court on Aug. 4, one day short of the anniversary. The filing accuses Durnan, a 61-year-old Long Island businessman, of intentionally and wrongfully assaulting her, and of gross negligence and reckless and wanton conduct that caused her injury and death. The family is seeking $50 million.

A summons with notice isn’t the lawsuit itself. It’s a preliminary filing that puts a defendant on notice that claims are coming and starts his clock to respond, which is why it lists the accusations without describing what the family believes happened on board. Durnan has 20 days to respond if he was served in person in New York, or 30 days if he wasn’t. If he doesn’t respond at all, the family can seek a default judgment of $50 million plus interest, attorney’s fees and costs, according to the filing.

Durnan hasn’t been charged with any crime. His attorney, Robert Holdman, said last year that his client was devastated by the death and had watched a friend die.

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Michael Bowe of Brithem LLP, the attorney representing the family, told NBC News that relatives ran their own investigation, including a second autopsy by an independent medical examiner, and that they don’t believe intoxicants killed her. He said EMTs found blood in her mouth, on her chest and head, on the floor and possibly behind her head, and that her body was cold despite her having supposedly just lost consciousness. Bowe has also said law enforcement told the family they believed the scene had been cleaned before responders got there. The family’s independent autopsy found only trace amounts of cocaine in her system, according to Bowe.

The Suffolk County Medical Examiner still hasn’t released its own findings, and the Suffolk County Police Department, whose Homicide Squad has had the case from the start, says the investigation is continuing. Attorneys for Durnan have not responded to requests for comment from Fox News or other outlets.

Nolan-O’Slatarra moved to New York from Dublin in 2015 and co-founded East x East, a swimwear and resort wear label that was running a pop-up in Montauk the summer she died. We first reported her death last August, when Suffolk County police said an initial autopsy had shown no evidence of violence and that a final cause of death was pending further examination. That’s still where the official record stands.

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