Searching for People and Sometimes Finding Satisfaction

On the day they found the body, David Brooks had been on the search since about 9 in the morning. The search area was expanding into some heavier brush area, but rescuers were getting their second wind and Brooks was planning to go all day, if necessary. His instincts, though, told him this one wouldn’t have a happy ending. “I had no doubt we were going to find the baby dead. If we found him, he would be dead.”

And that’s the way it turned out 10 days ago, when about 3:30 in the afternoon, a Marine from El Toro spotted little C.T. Turner in some debris near his Mission Viejo home. Authorities are still investigating his death, and no charges have been filed.

There are no silver linings when a 2-year-old dies, but I was struck by news accounts of the volunteer searchers.

Talk about your anonymous heroes.

One of them was Brooks, an unpaid reservist with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department who said he’d been involved in searches for the last 30 years. Figuring he had some stories to tell, I visited Brooks this week in his Anaheim Hills home to ask why he searches for missing people.

Brooks has looked for people in the freezing British countryside, the boiling Kuwaiti desert and, over the last seven years, among Orange County’s canyons and hillsides. He’s driven, no doubt like many other reservists, not by acclaim but by the challenges and private satisfaction.

“Sometimes you rescue someone,” he said, “then they go off in an ambulance, you never see them again, never hear from them again, never get a thank you, never get a smile or a wave, and that’s it.”

Brooks, a Britisher by birth who turns 61 next month, has a colorful past--or, at least, I assume he does, since he doesn’t want to discuss part of it. Those are his years with British Special Forces, which helped provide him with some of the expertise he brings to his volunteer work with the Sheriff’s Department.

He carries a pager with him, and I asked whether he’s happy or miffed when it beeps, knowing that it means there’s trouble afoot.

“I’m quite happy when it goes off,” he said. “I think you go into a different mode. I had a 24-year-old friend of my daughter’s here the other day, and we were out doing stuff with the pool when the pager went off. I went indoors, he followed me and saw the transition from dad cleaning the pool to this guy in uniform going out on search and rescue. In the next minute, I was strapping on a bulletproof vest and weapons. He said the transition was incredible.”

Brooks says he is one of 270 Sheriff’s Department volunteer reservists. These are not Good Time Charlies in search of a hobby. They train at the police academy, and their role ranges from searching for lost civilians to looking for suspects or criminals wanted by law enforcement. As such, their skills can range from “man-tracking” to rescue techniques to first aid.

A search is all business.

“It’s discipline, in the way you handle things,” Brooks said. “You may see someone over a cliff. You don’t just go charging down the cliff trying to get them, because you may bury them with debris and rock. There’s always the temptation to get there fast. You get there as quickly as you can, taking into consideration the safety of everyone you’re responsible for.”

There must be an inner glow, I said, when you’ve found a missing person or saved a life.

“There is an inner glow, but it doesn’t come from any inflated ego thing. It’s just that you’ve gone out, done something which probably a majority of people don’t want to do or couldn’t do, because they don’t have the training. You’ve gone out and used your knowledge and expertise and worked with a bunch of professionals, come back absolutely wrecked and tired, and you’ve achieved something. Whether it’s what you wanted or hoped to achieve, you’ve achieved something. You’ve made life perhaps a bit better for everybody else.”

But, of course, there is the adventure too.

“I suppose you’ve got to have a certain bit of craziness,” Brooks said. “You’ve got to want to go out and crawl around in the mountains in the rain in the middle of the night, but at the end of the day, there is the satisfaction you’re doing something you can do and probably do well.”

Along with the searches that had sad endings, I assumed there had to be some funny ones too, and Brooks told me about one. Years ago in England, he said, his search team had taken great pains to find a lost hiker.

“She had gone walking in the mountains, and the mist came down, and it got very, very cold. We found her at 2 in the morning, wearing lightweight clothes, curled up on the side of the riverbank, freezing. She was definitely on the way to heaven if we hadn’t found her.”

Later, the woman wrote to the rescuers, but instead of thanking them, she chastised them for not finding her sooner. “We fell over laughing,” Brooks recalled, “and we wrote back to her and said, ‘We do thank you for your kind letter of appreciation, and we just wish everyone would respond in a similar manner.’ ”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.