An Intoxicated Boater Kills a Local Hero
(‘Dark Waters,’ Forensic Files)
Harry Uhl raced his Chevy Malibu in stock car competitions, but he didn’t meet his end in a fiery crash on a track crowded with speeding autos.
It happened on a boat barely moving on Lake Cayuga on a quiet August night.
His death at age 27 involved no malice or other ill intent, but it turned into a criminal case because the boater who accidentally hit him fled the scene.
Forensic Files mentioned that Harry was a celebrity around Tompkins County in the Finger Lakes region of New York, so for this week, I looked for more background on his life as well as that of passenger Nasreen Raza, who suffered a mangled arm in the accident.
Suds and fins. So let’s get going on the recap of “Dark Waters” along with extra information drawn from coverage of the story in the Ithaca Journal and other internet research as well as a phone interview with retired prosecutor Gary Surdell.
Harry Allen Uhl Jr. came into the world on December 20, 1974, one of seven children born to Delores Leopolski Uhl and Harry Uhl Sr., in Ithaca, New York.
As a child, the outdoorsy Harry enjoyed fishing with his older sister and would sometimes wash her car to thank her for taking him, according to the Ithaca Journal.
The little guy also “grew up with a wrench in his hand” and loved automobiles.
No grudges. It was a family affair. His brother, brother-in-law, and father — who also raced — would “go over the car with a fine-tooth comb,” Harry Jr. told the Ithaca Journal. “Every week we’d find stuff. Sometimes they were silly things we didn’t ever think were broken, but we’d find it.”
Harry graduated from Lansing High School and worked as a machinist at Borg Warner Automotive. In the first years of the millennium, “Hurricane Harry” earned a championship at Skyline Raceway and placed at Thunder Mountain in Center Lisle.
“He was a fierce competitor,” rival Ward Harrison of Groton told the Post Standard/Herald-Journal. “He was hard charging and he’d get mad like the rest of us. We’d rub cars and banged them, but we’d still talk to each other — just maybe not that night.”
Like mother, like son. Harry was popular for his warm personality as well as his exploits on the track. He “couldn’t walk more than 50 feet without bumping into someone who knew and loved him,” according to the Ithaca Journal.
At some point during his racing career, he changed the name of his car to No. 55 as a tribute to his mother, who died of cancer at age 55.
Little did Harry know that he would die even more prematurely.
Fateful foursome. On August 17, 2002, Harry attended the Groton Old Home Festival, played a little pool, and then took his just-purchased fishing boat out on Cayuga Lake for its maiden voyage.
His pals Kristy Williams, Troy Maybee, and Nasreen Raza joined him. Forensic Files watchers will remember Nasreen — and her regal-looking face — from her appearance on the show.
Around 2 a.m., Harry steered to shore so Kristy and Troy could use a bathroom or a phone (media accounts vary) at Myers Point.
Demolition on the lake. Harry and Nasreen waited on the boat, which drifted a short distance from shore.
Suddenly, another vessel came out of nowhere like a demented dolphin.
Harry stood up and took a direct hit from the hull. A propeller tore into Nasreen’s arm.
“I heard a blood-curdling scream,” Jason Hutchings, a sailor on the lake that night, would later testify. “To be honest with you, [Harry’s boat] didn’t even look like a boat to me — it looked like a paper box in the water.”
Jason saw Nasreen with her right arm “ripped to shreds” and Harry “bent over in a fetal position.”
Jumped and ran. Another eyewitness, Joseph F. Knight, who was swimming in the lake that evening, recalled that the offending vessel “hopped up in the air a little bit” over Harry’s boat, then circled without stopping and zipped away.
Harry died of head trauma that night, and Nasreen was airlifted to University Hospital in Syracuse, where doctors saved her arm, although it would be disfigured.
The Uhls held Harry’s funeral at the Lansing United Methodist Church, with his coffin draped in a checkered flag.
Tragedy for many. In a letter to the Ithaca Journal printed on Oct. 30, 2002, Harry’s nephew Timothy Lane wrote:
Harry’s calling hours were a wakeup for me. How could a man who was still so very young…have an impact on so many people’s lives? Goodbye to my uncle, my role model, one of my best friends that would do anything to help me and vice versa.
A memorial stock car race was held in honor of Harry, and the Uhls created a $500 scholarship in his name for local vocational program graduates.
Harry’s brother-in-law Dick Stark changed his own racing car’s number to 455 (“for 55”) as another tribute to Harry.
Hauled not floated. Meanwhile, the community was demanding action on the hit and run.
“This was the biggest boating case we’d had in a long time and to come,” Gary Surdell told ForensicFilesNow.com. “We didn’t have forensic reconstruction experts on staff. We had to reach out to the state.”
Because Harry’s wounds had no marine life in them, investigators thought that the boat that hit him might have recently been transported via an automobile and not kept docked in the water.
Quick cover-up. They also considered the possibility that the guilty pilot sank the boat.
Fortunately, a passenger from the mystery boat came forward. Construction worker John Ottenschot told police that his coworker Floyd Wright, who had been driving the boat, might have hit something on that night of August 17, but they didn’t know what — it might have been a log.
Investigators examined the vessel in Floyd’s garage. They eventually determined that someone had made an effort to repair the damage, cleaning blood off the hull and spray-painting it white.
A tiny crack in the propeller held a bit of foam.
Alcohol aplenty. They made a case that the foam came from upholstery on Harry’s boat and paint chips found in wounds to Harry’s back, chin, and leg originated from Floyd’s boat.
Floyd, 35, was charged with failure to stop and report the accident, a misdemeanor, plus tampering with evidence, a Class E felony, because he repaired his boat.
John Ottenschot testified that he and Floyd drank at lakeside bars the Haunt and the Tradewinds on the fateful night, but they had Pepsi in addition to beer on the boat and Floyd didn’t seem intoxicated.
Bulb possibility. Defense lawyers Thomas Cramer and Andrew Bonavia insisted Floyd didn’t know what he hit because the other boat had no light on and its engine was off.
One prosecution theory held that Harry actually did have some form of illumination, but it broke off in the collision. “If Harry had his light on, that would have counted more against Floyd,” said Gary Surdell, who appeared on Forensic Files. “But that lake is so deep you would have needed Jacques Cousteau to find it.”
A jury convicted Floyd on all charges in April 2003.
On the spot. In June 2003, Judge M. John Sherman gave Floyd Wright — who already had a suspended driver’s license for operating a car while intoxicated — 16 months to two years in prison.
John Ottenschot faced no charges. “He clearly had bad feelings about the incident — what was he going to do, get into a fist fight with his friend?” Gary Surdell told ForensicFilesNow.com. “But he did the right thing in the end, although he didn’t give the whole account until he was on Forensic Files.”
Floyd served his time and then dropped out of sight. (New York’s Department of Corrections website lists other men named Floyd Wright currently in prison, but their descriptions don’t match his.)
Earlier episode. As for Nasreen Raza, it turns out that the boating accident wasn’t the first time she had made local headlines.
In 1998, at the age of 14, Nasreen was reported missing by her mother, Nancy Raza, after skipping school. After an anonymous caller tipped off police, they found her in the Courtyard Apartments on James Street in Syracuse. Nasreen was with an 18-year-old man she met on a phone chat line (remember those?) Nancy said that her daughter told her of sleeping in places where people woke up with roaches in their hair.
The guy was charged with endangering a minor.
Low profile. Nasreen apparently got her life back on track. In 2000, the local paper listed her as on the high honor roll at T-S-T Community School. In 2010 and 2011, she made the dean’s list at SUNY Courtland, where she studied anthropology.
There’s no word on what she’s doing today. (“Nasreen Raza” is a fairly common name — a lot of them are on social media.) But she’s probably happy to steer clear of drama and media attention.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
So many positive memories of Cayuga Lake as a child, thank you for the memories.
One of my classmates in grade school went to Cayuga Lake for vacations, and we heard a lot about it during show-and-tell.
Harry Uhl Jr. is my uncle and some of this is ridiculously inaccurate. Families should be reached out to before stuff like this is released to the public.