On June 27, 2001, 8-year-old Christina Baber would wait for her mother to pick her up from Girl Scout summer camp with all the other girls eager to reunite with their parents.
But unlike the other girls, Baber would not get to see her mom walk through the door. Instead, she would sit on the bench, eventually joined by her father, while camp counselors tried to figure out how they could send her home since her mother, now missing, was the parent listed to pick her up.
It was more than 20 years later, in January 2023, that Moore’s remains would be found, when two teams of volunteer divers used sonar technology to locate her upside-down sedan in the bottom of a pond in Davie not far from her house, a pond Baber passed every day on the school bus.
“That hit home a little harder, knowing you’ve driven past it so many times,” Baber told the Sun Sentinel on Friday, Jan. 12, almost a year to the day that her mother’s remains were found. “I mean, every day after school, that was the route my bus took, you know, and it hurts that I was that close, but yet so far at the same time.”
Moore’s remains would become the first successful find for a new group of divers, Sunshine State Sonar, working together with another group, Depths of History. Other groups, including Guardians of the Missing and Recon Dive Recovery, had searched for her as well.
Over the last year, teams of volunteer divers say they have found the remains of at least six known missing Floridians and hundreds of cars at the bottom of the state’s ponds and canals.
On Jan. 5th, Sunshine State Sonar said they helped find the remains of Maureen Sherman, missing for over 38 years, from a pond in Miami. The next day, they said they found an Oldsmobile, which Sunrise Police said contained unidentified remains. And the week before that, they found the remains of Sandra Lemire, missing for 12 years, in a retention pond near Disney World.
Divers say their goal is to bring answers to families who have lived for years without knowing what happened to their loved ones, perhaps picturing them kidnapped or murdered when it’s possible they just took a wrong turn.
“If it was our loved one, we’d want to know somebody out there was trying,” said Shelly McKinney, one of the core members of Sunshine State Sonar. “Even if law enforcement can’t, or don’t have resources.”
Why are they missing?
Thousands of people are missing with their cars throughout the United States, many of them deep below South Florida’s ponds and canals.
“We know how Florida is and we know there’s so many bodies of water,” said McKinney. “So we’re going pond to pond to pond to pond.”
The majority of the people missing are drivers involved in accidents or DUIs, as well as people with dementia, according to McKinney. Sometimes they’re suicides. Occasionally, foul play is involved.
In Moore’s case, Davie Police wouldn’t say.
“This case remains active,” Sgt. Kelvin Urbaez, a spokesperson for the agency, wrote in an email. “The circumstances surrounding this case are still being investigated. Therefore, we currently have limited information for public release.”
In a separate statement at the time of Moore’s discovery, police said that “certain information may not be released, as we do not want to affect the outcome of this case.”
The cars in Florida’s lakes and ponds vastly outnumber the drivers, often stolen or dumped after involvement in crimes. Some agencies have their own dive teams that search for missing people and cars, especially in the immediate aftermath of accidents, like the two in Tamarac over the last week. But when the cases go cold for years or cars disappear without a person driving them, volunteer divers say that police don’t have the time or manpower to search all of that water.
“They can only dedicate so many resources on their end to it, because their resources are spread thin,” McKinney said. “And if they have no new clues to go off of, they can’t dedicate resources to go out and randomly search. We don’t have that drawback.”
Coral Springs Fire Rescue and Miami-Dade Police did not respond to questions about their relationship with volunteer divers Thursday and Friday.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office, which has its own dive team, was unable to respond to questions emailed Thursday about whether their resources are spread too thin or require the assistance of volunteer divers. The dive team is made up of 40 deputies who work part-time with full-time positions elsewhere, according to the BSO website, and provide mutual aid to other areas.
Hazards ‘unseen’
Unlike police, most volunteer divers work for free, spending thousands of dollars on equipment while juggling spouses, kids and other full-time jobs.
McKinney works as a tattoo artist, commuting to Florida from Virginia. Ken Fleming, who runs Recon Dive Recovery, said he was between jobs but worked building data centers until recently.
The work is laborious. Dive teams compile databases of missing people, then use sites like Google Maps to find routes they might have taken the day they disappeared and bodies of water nearby. Then they head out with sonar devices that detect objects in the water.
Diving into Florida water and can be dangerous, Fleming said, many of the hazards “unseen,” and some you’d rather not see.
Those include biohazards from decomposing humans or animals, and alligators in almost every spot. Fleming wears a full face mask and tries to go deep as quickly as possible because alligators are “bottom-up predators.”
“As long as they’re a little bigger than me, I can handle 6 to 8 feet,” he said.
Long after someone goes missing, their skeletal remains have disintegrated; divers can spend days searching for pieces. Months after Moore was discovered, Fleming dove to find some of her remains, which he would put in his wetsuit. He said he spent four hours in the murky water until he recovered a piece of bone “buried about 18 inches deep in muck.” He also found a second car.
‘Mixed emotions’
Then there’s the job of telling families that you’ve found their loved one.
“Sometimes we reopen those wounds and we hate that,” McKinney said. “Or feeling like we took hope away that their loved one could ever come back. It is a Catch-22. It’s always a bittersweet situation.”
After divers found Sandra Lemire near Disney World earlier this month, Lemire’s son, Timothy Lemire Jr., told CNN he felt “mixed emotions.”
“I’m happy she wasn’t murdered or kidnapped or even got mugged,” he said, as he had wondered for years. In a Facebook post, he thanked Sunshine State Sonar, but wrote that he hated to think about his mother’s last moments, if she suffered or knew she was trapped.
Divers say the toll is worth it because they get to help families in need of answers who otherwise might not get them. Sometimes they form friendships, like with Baber, who became close with different divers who searched for her mother over the course of a year.
“There’s people out there wondering, I was one of them, if they will ever have answers,” she said. “Trying to find a needle in a haystack, of which canal or lake or ravine. It is great work what they’re doing, and selfless. And it’s beautiful.”
The unpaid work can feel more meaningful than a day job. Fleming is a former Marine, and needed a way to feel useful again when he returned home. He’s hoping to get other veterans involved.
“By doing work for someone else, you have a new mission again,” Fleming said. “You have a reason to exist. It gets a lot of guys unstuck. I’m finally doing something greater than myself, that’s still important, versus punching into a cubicle everyday or going to work in a warehouse.”
Some divers have achieved fame and financial success, amassing millions of subscribers documenting their discoveries on YouTube. Taken to an extreme, the good deed can become a competition driven by a hunger for success and clicks. Sometimes divers can get territorial, Fleming said, such as if a team from one region searches water in another.
Relationships with law enforcement can sometimes become fraught, such as if divers film active crime scenes for YouTube or draw attention to investigations that police don’t want the public to know about yet.
But divers often collaborate with law enforcement and have “symbiotic” relationships with detectives, Fleming said.
A week before Sunshine State Sonar found Sandra Lemire, McKinney said Orlando detectives had told their team where her cellphone had pinged when she disappeared, ultimately leading them to her.
Orlando Police said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was working on identifying the remains that were located in the vehicle and the Florida Highway Patrol is handling the crash investigation.
‘Most of it has just been peace’
When Baber got the call that divers had found her mother, she had to sit down. Then she cried.
In the 20 years since her mother disappeared, she had built a life in Indiana, though at every milestone, she thought of Moore: graduating, getting married, having her twin daughters.
Baber had left her father’s care for foster care when she was 15, explaining that he was “unable to raise me,” and ended up having a close bond with her foster mother, though she has never taken Moore’s place.
Many questions remain unanswered in her mother’s case, and police are tight-lipped. Baber knows her mother wouldn’t have left her willingly; she was meticulous, planning out everything on yellow post-it notes. Moore’s car had to travel hundreds of feet off the road to get to the pond. She doesn’t know how she got there, what happened, or why.
But now Baber has her mother’s ashes with her in Indiana. When she looks over at them, it feels “surreal.”
“It’s a moment I never thought I would get,” Baber explained. “It had its ups and downs with emotions. Most of it has just been peace and knowing I don’t have to search any longer. And she doesn’t have to be found.”
Information from the Orlando Sentinel was used in this report.
