Diver Who Perished With Son Was an Expert in His Field : Tragedy: Officials are still probing circumstances surrounding the deaths of the scuba expedition leader and his teen-age boy off San Pedro.

By all accounts, Darren Douglass was among the most accomplished scuba divers on the West Coast: underwater photographer, editor of a dive boat magazine, leader of charter excursions to the deep.

It was Douglass who was in charge, officials said, when a cadre of wet-suited explorers splashed overboard from the dive boat Atlantis on Sunday. It was Douglass who led the way through the murky depths as they plumbed the wreck of a sunken ship.

And when things went tragically wrong in an underwater tangle of anchor line six miles out to sea, it was Douglass who paid the silent, ultimate price.

On Monday, coroner’s investigators identified the bodies of the two people who died in the weekend’s scuba accident off San Pedro as those of the Glendora diving expert and his 14-year-old son, Jeremiah.

Los Angeles County Lifeguard Capt. Gary Crum said father and son were found, weighted down by their gear, within an arm’s length of each other on the ocean floor.

“It looked like they were probably touching until the time they passed out and died,” said Crum, who was among the rescuers called to the scene.

As Southern California’s ports and beaches bustled with preparations for another sunny, salty Fourth of July, authorities were piecing together the events that claimed the lives of the two Douglasses and left a third diver, Jeff Highley, seriously injured.

Details were sketchy. Douglass’ widow declined to comment on the accident.

But initial interviews with rescue workers and experienced divers indicated that the divers aboard the Atlantis had simply run out of luck in a situation fraught with risk: First, Crum said, they ventured to a spot so deep that even county rescue workers require special permission to attempt rescues there, and then they were forced by a series of increasingly urgent events to compound the risk by returning to the bottom repeatedly.

“What happened to Darren Douglass wasn’t for lack of training. He dove those wrecks all the time,” said Herb Miller of the California Wreck Divers’ Assn., who described Douglass as “one of the best,” while acknowledging Douglass was not a member of his association.

“But diving by its nature is a risky hobby, like sky-diving or mountain climbing, and when things go wrong, they go wrong in multiples.”

Witnesses said the trip had been organized by Douglass’ company, Aquatic Image Expeditions, as an expedition to one of the coast’s more popular advanced diving spots. Among his talents, Douglass was the author of a guide to shipwrecks in Southern California. Sunday’s destination, authorities said, was the Moody, a sunken World War I Navy destroyer that had been headed for the scrap heap when a movie studio bought it and blew it up offshore for a scene in a war movie called “Hell Below.”

Nestled into the kelp and sand 140 feet below the waves, the wreck is situated about a third of the way to Santa Catalina Island.

Miller said the Moody is known among divers as a “technical” rather than “recreational” diving spot, and Douglass’ diving charters--which focus on various shipwrecks up and down the coast--would have forbidden novice divers to make the trip.

Crum said the dive was a particularly deep one, even for a diver of Douglass’ experience. The deeper divers go, the greater pressure is brought to bear on their systems, and the more nitrogen is absorbed by their blood--conditions that leave divers open to a number of physiological problems, including a disorientation known as “rapture of the deep” and a potentially deadly condition called the bends.

“We have very solid water people, and we don’t allow our divers--who train weekly--to dive in more than 100 feet,” he said.

Another rescue diver, who spoke on condition of anonymity, explained the hazard this way: “The deeper you go, the more there is that can go wrong,” he said. “And obviously, a lot went wrong.”

Crum said that things began to go wrong about 2 p.m., when the group had finished for the day. They had already made a number of dives, he said, and, in divers’ parlance, had “used up their bottom time,” spending as much time at that depth as they safely could.

But as they tried to pull up anchor, it became clear that the anchor line had snagged, he said, and “they made a decision to send divers back down to help free the anchor.”

Within moments of the dive, he said, one of the divers--Highley, 32, of Long Beach--floated unconscious to the surface. Crum said the crew of the Atlantis managed to bring him around, and the other divers underwater began surfacing.

But shortly thereafter, Crum said, Douglass realized, gut-wrenchingly, that his son, whom he had brought along for the adventure, had not surfaced yet.

A father of five, Douglass apparently calculated the incalculable risks and slipped under the waves again in search of his child. As the minutes passed and neither surfaced, Crum said, their mates radioed for help--which was, at best, an hour away on shore.

Crum said it was after 3:30 p.m. by the time rescue divers arrived via two county Baywatch boats and a Fire Department chopper. They found the father and son hovering in the water at the sandy bottom, and rushed both to area medical facilities, but both were dead on arrival.

Highley was treated at the Los Angeles County-USC Catalina Hyperbaric Chamber on Santa Catalina Island. He was transferred late Sunday to the center’s main facility near Downtown Los Angeles, where his condition was listed as serious but stable late Monday.

Times staff writer Renee Tawa and Times researcher Nona Yates contributed to this story