Family Mounts Search for Diver

The last time anyone saw Shinho Steve Seo, he was slipping beneath the ocean’s surface at a remote place called Punta Prieta, about 700 miles south of the Mexican border in the Sea of Cortez.

It was New Year’s Day. Seo, an enthusiastic free-diver, snorkeler and spear fisherman who was out on the ocean with another diver and a dive operator, was going after prey about 60 feet down. As far as anyone knows, he never came back. And though searchers later recovered his spear gun, the 34-year-old mortgage banker was not to be found.

Now Seo’s family is mounting an expedition to discover his fate. On Friday, a four-man team including his brother and a private investigator flew to southern Baja, where they plan to spend the next week combing for clues by boat, scuba, airplane and car.

“At this point, I’m really not sure exactly what happened,” said Howard Seo, 37, a San Diego patent attorney who expects to spend in excess of $10,000 on the search. “There’s still a chance he may be living; maybe some fisherman rescued him and he’s knocked out unconscious.”

Whatever the outcome, Howard Seo said, the family needs closure. “If he’s alive, it will be a miracle and I will be happy,” he said. “If he washed up on shore, maybe we can recover the body. He’s my brother and I want to do everything possible to find him.”

By all accounts, the missing man -- a native South Korean and longtime Orange County resident who recently moved to Norwalk with his wife and two young daughters -- loves the ocean. His New Year’s trip to Santa Rosaria, however, was a last-minute deal: Fellow diver Tim Stewart of Huntington Beach had planned it with another man, who then came down with the flu.

On the recommendation of the sick man, according to Bill Garcia, the private investigator overseeing the search, Seo was invited aboard as a substitute. And on Dec. 30, Garcia said, the pair headed south in Seo’s truck on an excursion that was to last several days.

Stewart said Friday that he was too distraught to talk about what happened next. “I’m having trouble dealing with the whole ordeal,” he said. “I’m trying to put it behind me.”

But Garcia, who specializes in finding missing people in rough terrain, offered the following scenario, based in part on a missing-person’s report filed Jan. 5 by Stewart and Howard Seo with the Huntington Beach Police Department.

The two divers arrived in Santa Rosaria on New Year’s Eve, Garcia said, checked into a hotel and went to bed early. The next morning, he said, they hired a dive operator to take them out in a 20-foot rubber boat.

After arriving at Punta Prieta -- Spanish for “dark point” -- the three men entered the ocean together, though the dive operator said he later saw Seo heading for deeper water.

After about 30 minutes, Garcia said, the dive operator speared a fish, stowed it on the boat and motored to a nearby spot to pick up Stewart.

Almost immediately, Garcia said, he headed back to Seo’s area -- marked by a buoy -- but could find only Seo’s floating spear gun, which appeared to have been fired. He dived into the water and followed the spear gun’s cord down about 60 feet into a coral cave, Garcia said, but Seo could not be found.

Paul Romanowski, an experienced diver and past president of the Los Angeles Fathomiers, a dive club that Seo also belongs to, said Seo, whom he described as a “fairly new but enthusiastic” diver, probably suffered a “shallow-water blackout” and drowned.

“Basically,” Romanowski said, “you hold your breath so long that you pass out cold. You work to suppress your urge to breathe, but you can overdo it and not even realize it. You run down your oxygen too far, and it’s like not having enough electricity: The lights go out.”

No matter what the outcome, Howard Seo says, he feels compelled to search. “If I don’t do this,” he said shortly before departing for Mexico, “I will regret it for the rest of my life.”