Annie Elise

Michael claimed that he saw Nathan inside of his boat, leaning over the side and drilling holes into the side of his boat with a hole saw.

Definitely not the kind of thing that you would want to do when you're depending on the boat to not have holes in it and to keep you afloat, right?

And I'm not even sure if Michael knew Nathan that well or if just anybody and everybody at the marina is an acquaintance or a friend, but he ended up going up to Nathan and asking him like, hey, what the heck are you doing?

Maybe it was the alcohol giving him liquid courage.

Maybe he was just trying to be friendly.

Who really knows?

But Nathan apparently had a perfectly good explanation.

He claimed that he was replacing the trim tabs, which are pretty essential, especially on a boat that's going out into the ocean.

The tabs are apparently used to make sure that the boat's nose stays down so that it can get through bigger waves.

But Michael wasn't stupid, and he claimed that, to him, it didn't look like a replacement job.

It looked like Nathan was purposefully damaging the tabs and taking them off the boat, if anything else.

Michael had always been around the water and he claimed that he knew that Nathan's so-called repair was going to end up being trouble.

So it wasn't a situation of, okay, well, maybe this will happen due to his modifications.

Michael knew without a doubt that the minute that the boat went into the water, it was going to start sinking.

But what Michael hadn't realized that day

was that he saw Nathan premeditating his own mom's murder, which that's a very heavy weight to hold when you look back in hindsight.

Now, the insurance case went to trial in 2019, and everyone was tuning in to what was happening.

Everyone felt like Nathan was guilty, similarly to his grandpa's death years before, and everyone was shocked that he somehow was still a free man.

Now, this trial was pretty bizarre because even though the insurance company's legal team was arguing that Nathan had purposefully caused damage to the boat and therefore didn't deserve a payout, they were also kind of saying that he had premeditated his mother's murder.

They were saying it without outright saying it.