An attorney for the widow of a southwest Florida powerboat racer killed in last November’s Key West Super Boat World Championship has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Broward Circuit Court against the race’s producer and two medical directors.

The suit, filed Friday on behalf of Priscilla Gratton by attorney Michael Allweiss, accuses John Carbonell, president of Super Boat International Productions, Inc., and race medical directors Donald DiPetrillo and Brian Haff of gross negligence in the Nov. 11 drowning of veteran racer Joey Gratton, 59, of University Park. The suit demands damages of more than $15,000 and a jury trial.

Gratton was at the throttles of the Page Motorsports boat with owner/driver Stephen Page of Fort Myers when the 38-foot catamaran overturned on the first turn in the final lap of the second race in the three-race championship. Page climbed out through an escape hatch in the floor of the cockpit, but Gratton was trapped in his seat.

According to the lawsuit, Gratton was alive and uninjured right after the crash, and fought for several minutes to free himself from the harness system that kept him in his seat while breathing from an emergency air tank. With certified rescue dive paramedics dubbed “angels” hovering over the scene in helicopters, Carbonell held back from deploying them, and instead designated two “untrained, inexperienced and ill-equipped volunteers” on a nearby boat as first-responders as a cost-saving measure, according to the suit.

As other race boats roared by, the volunteer divers took several minutes to swim from their boat to the wreckage, which began to sink — shutting the escape hatch and trapping Gratton inside, the suit alleges. By the time rescuers got the hatch open, Gratton’s air supply had run out and he drowned.

“… This should have been a routine, successful rescue, had Defendants merely followed standard industry practices, procedures, and protocols, and SBI’s own rules,” Allweiss, a former director of the American Power Boat Association, wrote in his complaint.

To avoid liability in case of an accident, the suit says, Carbonell prevented rescue personnel from conducting pre-race safety inspections to familiarize themselves with the features on individual race boats.

To make matters worse, the complaint says, Gratton’s death came two days after the drowning of Missouri racers Bob Morgan and Jeffrey Tillman, whose Big Thunder boat flipped upside down in Key West Harbor during the event’s opener. According to the suit, Carbonell, DiPetrillo and Haff did nothing to correct “the obvious defects and deficiencies” in their policies after the first tragedy.

“If you had two people drown and you did nothing to shore up your response, then people need to go to jail,” Allweiss said in a telephone interview.

No criminal charges have been filed in connection with the race. Gratton’s death was ruled accidental by the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office. The deaths of Morgan and Tillman were ruled accidental by the Monroe County Medical Examiner.

DiPetrillo — fire chief for the Seminole Tribe — Carbonell, and Haff did not return phone messages seeking comment.