Teen who lost fingers in jet-ski mishap sues Mission Bay Aquatic Center

Keira Doshi, 17, says she will not let her disfigurement define her but she wants to make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Doshi is suing the Mission Bay Aquatic Center (MBAC) for negligence after an incident she told NBC7 did not have to happen.

In July of 2022, Doshi, who was then 15 years old, was a counselor-in-training at MBAC’s Watersports Camp.  She was usually assigned to paddleboarding duties but on the morning of July 28th, she says she was asked to help younger campers who were wakeboarding.

When Doshi went to the launching area she was surprised to see five boats and a jet ski.  She asked what the jet ski was for and says she was told a boat was “broken” and out of service, so the jet ski would be used in its place.

A 19-year-old counselor was the jet ski driver.  Doshi told NBC7, “They instructed me to sit backwards on the jet ski with my right hand on the handle and my left hand holding the flag.”  She was also told to make sure the 70-foot tow rope did not get stuck under the jet ski.

After the first child was pulled on the wakeboard, Doshi said she reeled in the tow rope by coiling it around her heft hand when,  “All of the sudden the jet ski jolted and moved the opposite direction. I fell forward off the back of the jet ski with 70-feet of rope wrapped around my hand and all of the sudden it just pulled taut and I just felt really like something pulled my left arm really really hard,” she said.

“I initially thought I’d just dislocated my elbow or something like that because I knew it was a hard pull, and as I was swimming back to the jet ski I realized what had happened and I kind of looked down and these three fingers were gone and it was bleeding, there was like blood everywhere,” she recalled.

As camp staffers took Doshi back to shore, she said the jet ski driver was told to go back and look for her fingers, which were mangled in the rope.

“So they cut them out of the wakeboarding line and put them in like a little bag, a bag of ice,” Doshi said.

Doshi was rushed to the hospital where surgeons spent 12 hours reattaching her severed fingers.  She was in the ICU for 15 days and subjected to various treatments and procedures, including leech therapy, where leeches were used to try to return blood circulation to her fingers.

NBC 7

Ultimately, only one of her severed fingers on Doshi's left hand was saved. She now wears purple prosthetic fingers on the other two, which she says look “cool” but aren’t anything close to the real thing.  Simple tasks like brushing her hair, buttoning a blouse or opening a car door are now slow processes.

The young musician thought she would never play the Viola again.  Doshi took the instrument up when she was 8 years old and was an accomplished player. She was thrilled when one of her teachers promised to help her learn to play on the opposite side of her body.  She is now back in the orchestra, although not yet to the level she was before losing her fingers.

Doshi told NBC7 she is suing the MBAC because nobody there gave her the training she needed to avoid getting hurt.

“It was going to happen,” said her attorney, Brett Schreiber.  “It was just a matter of who it was going to happen to and on that particular fateful day it just so happened that Doshi was the one who fell victim to just an abject complete systemic failure.”

The lawsuit, filed February 5, mentions text messages between two of MBAC’s administrators that Schreiber says shows they knew the counselors’ training was inadequate on jet skis.

NBC 7 reached out to MBAC for reaction.  They sent us this brief written statement:

“The Mission Bay Aquatic Center (MBAC), a provider of water sports and education to the community for over 50 years with a strong and continuing commitment to safety, is aware of the accident that occurred during the summer of 2022, and as this matter involves a program participant and pending litigation, MBAC cannot provide any further comment.”