Guam PIC Negligence Lawsuit: When a Vacation Turns Into a Family’s Worst Memory

From a distance, Tumon Bay appears to be incredibly tranquil. The resorts lining its shore have spent decades packaging the water’s seemingly digitally enhanced turquoise hues into something marketable, such as weekend packages, birthday getaways, and customized family memories. It was precisely that kind of trip for 70-year-old South Korean man Young Jae Chung. To celebrate his birthday, he traveled to Guam in September 2023 with his wife, son, and two young grandsons. The plan included a snorkeling lesson at the Pacific Islands Club. Nobody’s expectations were fulfilled.

Chung’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the District Court of Guam, claiming that the snorkeling instructor’s actions that day directly contributed to Chung’s demise. Before the lesson started, he allegedly neglected to inquire about the participants’ comfort level in open water, physical fitness, and prior snorkeling experience. The group was led into deeper water above a coral reef without receiving any meaningful instruction on how to use the snorkel correctly, and the pace was described in the lawsuit as “extremely fast.” Chung and his spouse found it difficult to keep up. Water was seeping into his mask. On the instruction side, no one seemed to notice.

The first person to notice it was Chung’s wife. For what seemed like too long, her husband had been submerged face down in the water. When she called to their son, he turned to see that something wasn’t right. Shouting for assistance, he carried his father toward the coast. The family claims that it took the instructor two to three minutes to follow them back to the beach. He allegedly tried CPR when he got there without taking off Chung’s life jacket first. About five minutes after the alarm was set off, PIC lifeguards arrived on the scene. They did CPR, applied a defibrillator, and took off the life jacket. At Guam Memorial Hospital, Chung was pronounced dead. Later, the family received an emergency services bill totaling over $6,900.

The lawsuit was filed on February 18, 2025, and it seeks $4,806,900 in total damages: $2 million for wrongful death, $1 million for Chung’s wife’s loss of support, $300,000 for each of his two sons, and $300,000 for each of the four family members who witnessed the incident. The dive and resort safety communities are already paying attention to the underlying allegations, though it’s possible that the dollar amounts will change as the case progresses. There is a way that this type of case can accomplish that.

It’s not just the tragedy of the Guam PIC negligence lawsuit that makes it so remarkable. The reason for this is that the Pacific Islands Club is currently dealing with a second, distinct lawsuit that is related to an incident that occurred on the same property. Another South Korean visitor, Eunhee Lee, is suing PIC for a slip and fall that happened on March 27, 2024. Her complaint states that she was walking on the sidewalks between the hotel and the beach when she slipped and fell on a wet or slick surface, resulting in what her legal team characterizes as serious injuries. She is requesting more than $1 million in damages.

According to Lee’s lawsuit, PIC neglected to provide handrails or other safety features, install slip-resistant surfaces, and alert visitors to the hazardous conditions. When PIC’s lawyer appeared before a federal magistrate judge in late August 2025, he expressed his preference for mediation over a trial. It doesn’t necessarily indicate an admission of anything, and it’s a fairly common legal move. However, it is difficult to distinguish the larger issue of how resorts in tourist-dependent areas manage risk from the optics of two ongoing negligence lawsuits at one resort, both involving foreign visitors and focusing on purported safety failures.

Observing these cases proceed through the legal system gives the impression that Guam’s resort sector operates in an environment where foreign guests arrive with genuine faith in the safeguards put in place to protect them. This litigation involves that trust. In addition to seeking damages, the families bringing these lawsuits contend that someone should have known better and that basic, predictable precautions were not taken. In other parts of the Pacific, similar cases have surfaced. There are concerns about whether the hospitality industry as a whole takes aquatic safety seriously enough for visitors who might not know the water at all, as evidenced by a similar wrongful death claim involving a snorkeling-related death at a Hawaiian resort that has been making its way through the legal system.

The future is not straightforward for PIC. The snorkeling case includes specific accusations about an instructor’s behavior, a death with a named victim, and grieving witnesses—the kind of information that usually lands heavily in a courtroom. Mediation is the next step in the slip and fall case, which could end amicably. Two open negligence lawsuits, however, are more than just a legal hassle in terms of reputation. South Korean tourists have historically accounted for a sizable share of Guam’s tourist arrivals, and Tumon resorts rely almost entirely on foreign tourism. How much these cases will impact that relationship in the near future is still unknown.

Something about the Chung case in particular lingers. A 70-year-old man was celebrating his birthday with his family at a resort that appeared to be a secure and friendly location by all accounts. There were his grandsons. It was blue water. A family’s celebration turned into something that no one in the family will ever be able to fully move past somewhere between what a guest reasonably expects and what an instructor actually checked before leading a group into deeper water. That part remains the same regardless of what the courts decide in the end.