Search and Recovery Work : Team Dives In Where Others Fear to Tread

One day, after going to work in Garden Grove, Ken Doesburg and a group of his co-workers returned from a job covered with algae, greasy brown muck and duck excrement. And they were pretty happy about it.

“That job was really amazing to me,” said Doesburg, “because we found all of it, all three pieces. But that pond. . . . We called it Walden Pond. It was absolutely the worst thing you could think of. It was like crawling through a thicket at night blindfolded. But we found the whole thing.”

The whole thing, when pieced together, became a shotgun, the barrel of which had allegedly been used in the bludgeoning murder of a young man. Outwitting a murder suspect who apparently had thought the filthy Garden Grove pond would be the perfect place to permanently dispose of a murder weapon was enough to make Doesburg and his five colleagues smile-- --with their mouths closed.

The six men make up the Orange County sheriff-coroner’s office Underwater Search and Recovery Team. At its simplest, their job is to fish out of the water anything that got there as a result of a crime or an accident. One week may find them trying to refloat a boat sunk in Newport Harbor, while the next assignment will compel them to recover bodies from an offshore plane crash.

Their official name is almost a misnomer because they say they often find themselves submerged in matter that is more solid than liquid.

“On most of our dives, there’s just zero visibility because we do a lot of our work in inland water,” said Bob Lohrman, one of the four original divers attached to the Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol who were absorbed into the newly formed Search and Recovery Team in 1975. “It’s fairly dangerous because of the debris down there. You can’t have a guy who panics in that kind of situation. If you get hung up on some branches, you can’t worry about drowning. You have to stay cool.”

Clawing Through Growth

On a recent search in a pond in Costa Mesa, Doesburg said, “we ran into growth down there that was so bad that we actually had to fight to get down, just claw through it. Once you’re there, you can’t see your hand in front of your face, and then you have to claw to get back up again.”

“Basically, you crawl,” said Jerry McGraw, an original member of the team. “Most of the time you can’t use standard navigation or compasses because you can’t see. You’re mucking. It isn’t what you or I would really consider diving. Or fun.”

There are rewards. The six team members--Deputies Doesburg, Lohrman, McGraw, Dennis Ryan, Randy Ploessel and Pat Glasgow--are attached full time to the Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol offices in Dana Point, Newport Beach and Sunset Beach as deputies, and when they draw a diving assignment, they collect overtime pay for it. And they schedule monthly training dives and occasional “fun dives” for themselves to keep up their proficiency and to take advantage of opportunities to dive, unhurried, in clearer ocean water.

“We’re all sport divers,” said Doesburg, “and we all like to dive on our own on the weekends, so we like to take the opportunities to schedule decent dives in decent water.”

But on the job, the team takes what comes. Whenever any law enforcement agency in Orange County needs something pulled out of the drink, the team gets the call. And most of its estimated 30 call-out dives a year are of the sort that would keep most sport divers on the beach.

A sampling of dives since January 1:

- On Jan. 10, a single diver found and recovered a propeller that had become dislodged from a Harbor Patrol boat.

- On March 3, the team dived in 55-foot water about a quarter-mile off Newport Pier in an attempt to locate the wreckage of a light plane and any bodies. They found neither.

- On March 7, they made a second attempt and found both the plane and one body.

- On April 4, the team searched the water off Huntington Beach near Pacific Coast Highway and Golden West Street for the body of a drowning victim. The dive had to be discontinued because of heavy surf and darkness. The body washed ashore the next morning.

- On May 22, the team dove in a settling pond in Anaheim and recovered the body of a drowning victim. They found the body in 25 feet of murky water. The visibility in the pond, using a light, was one foot.

“The first really big thing we worked was a weapons recovery in Huntington Harbour in 1976 near the Anaheim Bay bridge,” Doesburg said. “We got one gun and another gun that turned out to be evidence in an unrelated murder case. But we found all kinds of stuff down there. Motorcycles, slot machines, cash registers, TVs, stereos. The proverbial junkyard. It filled a barge. It was unbelievable.”

Frequent Part of Job

Body recovery is a frequent, and unpleasant, part of the job, Doesburg said.

“You see a lot that are dismembered or badly damaged,” he said. He told of one diver who had found the wreckage of a plane and was searching the broken fuselage for bodies.

“A surge came along and all of a sudden out of the fuselage here comes this headless body, whoosh! That got to him.”

“I get really tired of that stuff,” Lohrman said.

The sensibilities are not the only things that suffer in such a situation, said McGraw.

“Plane crashes are the worst because of the debris,” he said. “You have all this sharp, jagged metal.”

Still more obstacles appear in the form of misinformation.

“You have to have a good informant,” Lohrman said. “If somebody threw something off the end of a pier and you ask and somebody points and just says ‘It’s out there,’ you’re going to spend days looking for it.”

Sometimes, Doesburg said, the team uses an object that is approximately the same size and weight of the object they want to find. They take it to the site where it was thrown into the water and try to duplicate the throw. The divers then follow the object down.

Systematic Search

Once there, if visibility permits, they place, parallel, two 150-foot-long lead-weighted lines and crawl hand over hand along the lines in a systematic search of the bottom. Each diver wears a distinctively colored wet suit and has his name stenciled above his mask on the rubber hood for quick identification.

“Sometimes, though,” said Doesburg, “it’s too mucky to tell who’s who.”

The team didn’t invent the slogan “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.” But they may have refined it.

“It’s rewarding when you get the job done,” said Lohrman. “But sometimes you have to go through a lot of bad messes to do it.”