Volunteer divers searching for long-lost missing persons found over 30 cars in a lake in Doral, Florida. Police then swooped in to begin the extraction process with homicide detectives standing by. The cars could be linked to a number of different crimes over the last few decades.
When a case goes cold there’s only so much that authorities can do. They have to justify the use of their resources and in rare cases that leaves the door open for citizens to step in and do a little more detective work. In this case, that detective work meant diving into a lake near Doral, Florida where volunteers found 32 cars linked to various crimes.
One of those volunteer divers, Ken Flemming, spoke with WSVN 7 to explain their goals and what they found. “We’re here trying to solve missing persons cold cases,” said Fleming. “When we discover a spot like this with multiple vehicles, it pretty much indicates that a crime where they’re disposing the vehicles and hiding them from law enforcement,” he continued. Once the divers found the cars they notified authorities who took over from there.
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“We received information from a citizen on Sunday that apparently he was diving out here he appeared to observe what appeared to be several dozen vehicles that had been dumped in this lake. Once we received this information, our divers unit immediately collaborated with other agencies at the police department and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue so we could put this operation together in order to be able to recover all of the vehicles,” said police detective Alvaro Zabaleta to NBC-2 News.
Evidently, the very first vehicle pulled from the water was a stolen 2002 Nissan Altima and that’s what Zabaleta expects most of the cars to be. “These are most likely the type of vehicles that we are going to find here dumped in this lake. Vehicles that were abandoned and they wanted to get rid of them. Or those that were taken for a joy ride, they were stolen and were dumped inside the lake,” he said.
At the same time, homicide detectives are on standby should any of the 32 vehicles end up linked to a homicide investigation. Some of the vehicles could’ve been dumped to hide evidence or commit insurance fraud too. Video from the salvage effort shows that many are pre-2000 models.