DORAL, FLA. (WSVN) - A diving team that took to the water in Doral has uncovered not just one underwater mystery, but nearly three dozen.
Underwater video captured a diver finding a vehicle in the murky waters of a lake located near Miami International Airport.
Divers Ken Fleming and Doug Bishop spoke with 7News about their finds on Sunday.
“We’re here trying to solve missing persons cold cases,” said Fleming.
The mission led these divers to Doral in an effort to detect ditched vehicles.
“That’s when we realized that we had 32 cars underwater,” said Fleming.
Fleming said the vehicles were dumped in this body of water during various criminal activities.
“When we discover a spot like this with multiple vehicles, it pretty much indicates that a crime where they’re disposing the vehicles and hiding them from law enforcement,” he said.
The divers work solely as volunteers. They travel across the state, using sonar technology to search bodies of water.
“We have a giant database of our own that we extract, where we go, ‘This person is missing with their vehicle in this general region of South Florida,'” said Fleming, “and so, we have 40 that we’re targeting right now of folks that disappeared, anywhere from two or three months ago to 30, 40 years ago.”
On this current mission, the divers’ research brought them to an area near Northwest 87th Avenue and 13th Terrace, where, they said, nearly three dozen cars are at the bottom of a lake.
The divers are hoping for a critical clue in an unsolved crime.
“We have a case where someone drove from Pinellas County down to pick up their relatives at the airport, and then they disappeared,” said Fleming, “so, in this spot, we’re near the airport, it’s a large body of water, it has easy access to get into, so we would target that as a potential foul play spot.”
Statewide, the team said, they have found 60 submerged vehicles to date that are possibly linked to crimes.
When asked why they do this, the divers said that for them, the answer is simple.
“It’s about providing answers for families where they don’t have them,” said Bishop. “Departments, respectfully, have to justify their use of resources, and when a case goes cold, we have the ability to step in. We don’t have to justify our use of resources, and we can help eliminate the drag on personnel locally. We can do this, we specialize in it, we can do it on a high level and do so as volunteers.”
The divers’ next step is to work with Miami-Dade County to remove all 32 vehicles. They said they will give any information they find to police to hopefully help in any cold cases.
Sunday afternoon, a spokesperson for Doral Police issued a statement that reads, “We have been informed that a private search company possibly located multiple sunken vehicles in the area of 9064 NW 13th Terr. Although we cannot confirm at this time, we will continue to gather further information in the coming days and work with multiple entities to investigate this matter.”
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