Florida divers go deep with sonar to find sunken cars, solve cold-case mysteries
They found it the other day, out on their little boat with their fancy fish finder: a shadow on the sonar with a golden blob in the center.
Now, on a warm winter afternoon, they’re wriggling into wetsuits below the 40th Street bridge, about to dive for a license plate.
In the last two years, the half-brothers who own Sunshine State Sonar have found more than 350 cars in canals, ponds and waterways across Florida.
Weekend fishermen turned amateur underwater detectives, the true-crime junkies dive into cold cases, searching for the disappeared. Sometimes, they choose the cases themselves, following threads online. Other times, law enforcement asks for their help.
One family, who thought their mom had left them, learned that she had driven off the road. Relatives of a missing teacher suspected his girlfriend — then found out he had been submerged in a canal for three years. And the son of a young mother who thought she had been murdered was relieved when her death proved a watery accident.
They both speak excitedly, spewing staccato sentences with thick Boston accents that haven’t ebbed after two decades in Florida.
