I've been a search and rescue diver for 12 years. You have no idea how horrific some of the things we find are.

I’ve been an S&amp;A diver for 12 years. Technically I’m a police diver, but most of what I do is search and rescue. That’s what we call it when we go in looking for a missing person and we don’t expect to find them alive. <br><br>I’ve helped recover dozens of bodies off the bottom of lakes, rivers, and even the ocean. I could write a whole book about all the terrible things I’ve seen, and maybe one day I will. Tonight, though, I’m just going to tell you about a few of the worst.<br><br>When I was a rookie, this was my first real case. Some little boy had gone missing at a lake. He was swimming way out when he went under without resurfacing, and despite the efforts of his family to find him, they lost sight of him before they could get to him. By the time we got there, night had fallen, and so our first job was to find his family and tell them that we wouldn’t be looking for him that night.<br><br>This is something you have to do a lot. I understand that it’s frustrating for people who want something *done*, but there’s no point sending divers out unless you have a good idea where they should be looking, and in the dark, even that isn’t much help. So regrettably, we sent the family away, and went out to get a reading of where sonar said the little boy was.<br><br>We found him the next day, as soon as the water cleared enough to sufficiently pump in air and have a good look. The boy was 7 years old. He was on the bottom of the lake, face down in the silt. His family was right there on the shore when we found his body, and as soon as they saw us signal that we’d located him, they began to wail. <br><br>I remember his father kept repeating the words “This isn’t happening.” over and over again, like he was chanting it. <br><br>Now, all bodies recovered from the bottom of a lake look bad. The water pressure destroys a lot of the tissue in a way that is visually very, very unpleasant. However, this boy was whisked away pretty quickly after we got his body up, as his parents didn’t want to see what was left of him. <br><br>The next was about 6 years ago. A young woman went missing. Her car was found on the side of the road leading to a bridge, and it looked as though she’d just driven off of it and into the river with no forewarning. The only reason the police were called at all was because someone saw part of the car go over as they were driving by. <br><br>We had a pretty good idea where she would be, and it was relatively shallow. She’d only been missing a couple days when we went out looking for her. In cases like this, we generally try and find a likely place to enter the water and begin working our way outward in a spiral until we either find what we’re looking for or we have to come up for air and move on to a different area.<br><br>The first thing I saw was the car. It was upside down, and one of the doors was hanging open. I made my way to it, and it took a moment for me to see her. She was belted into the drivers seat. <br><br>This was another case where the water pressure had caused a great deal of tissue destruction, but on top of that, the fish had gotten to her. Since she was belted in and hadn’t been able to get out, it hadn’t been a simple case of the fish coming across a carcass. They had actually started to pick at her through the windows. The damage they’d done was in the thousands of holes they’d picked into her flesh with their tiny mouths. <br><br>Her mother was whisked away by EMTs when we told her they’d recovered her daughter’s body. She just began sobbing uncontrollably and screaming, and she collapsed. I heard she had a nervous breakdown and had to spend a few days in the hospital.<br><br>The last one that really stuck with me was a little girl who’d been missing for several weeks. She’d disappeared from her back yard one night, and despite a huge search effort from both professionals and locals, they’d found nothing. She was only 5. <br><br>When a case like this goes cold and no one has seen or heard anything, and a search of the yard and surrounding area reveals nothing, there really isn’t anything you can do other than hope someone sees something unusual or hears something and comes forward. <br><br>This little girl’s family began to lose hope. They had been combing the woods near their house daily. They had even gone out searching in the rain, and braved the December cold without losing faith that they would eventually find their daughter. <br><br>One night, it rained heavily. It was so bad that the storm warning didn’t end until almost 4 in the morning, and even then, the rain stayed. It just wasn’t coming down in torrents. The storm turned the creek that ran through the woods into a rapid. <br><br>The little girl’s mother had a ‘gut feeling’ the next day. It was sunny, and she decided to go back out looking. She was alone except for the family beagle when she followed the creek. The animal began barking, and she went over to see why. She called 911 as soon as she saw it. <br><br>We were there in less than half an hour. She still stays in contact with some of the guys who helped find her daughter. When we got there, we followed her down the creek, and where the beagle had been barking, there was a small waterfall. She’d followed it because she was looking for anything out of the ordinary, as we’d suggested to the family when they began searching. She said she had a feeling about the water because of all the rain. <br><br>When we climbed down to where the waterfall was, the whole area reeked of decomposition. The little girl’s body had been caught against a large branch that was sticking out of the ground. The water had whisked away most of her clothes, and some of her flesh, and as the water cascaded across her head, it looked briefly, briefly, like she was alive. <br><br>Her head moved with the force of the water, and it twitched, and it honestly looked like she was trying to gasp for air, except her flesh was rotting and maggots were falling out of her eyes. I seriously almost lost my lunch. I did have to take a moment to compose myself before I could help get her body up. <br><br>The family didn’t come to claim her remains. Apparently they just couldn’t handle actually seeing what the water had done to her. <br><br>That cascading water sound has stuck with me ever since, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it out of my head.