ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 19, 1996 TAG: 9608190136
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEESVILLE
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
... THERE ARE THE state police divers. There's no waiting to join their ranks. Candidates must pass tests that rival Olympic events, then investigate crimes in dark, watery places - while battling unseen danger.
In zero visibility, there's not much but cold, darkness, and the sound of your own breath.
Picture yourself blind, deep underwater, weighted down with 50 pounds of equipment. Instead of having a tendency to rise, your limbs sink slightly into the mud and silt. Unseen dangers lie everywhere, waiting to entangle you: tree limbs, fishing lines, barbed wire, and sharp steel support bars jutting from eroded concrete bridges, to mention a few.
Your only notion of up and down and backward or forward comes from a slender rope held in your hand and your only means of communication is squeezing the hand of your partner.
If you're already having a tough time imagining yourself coping in these conditions, try adding one more image to the scenario: You're a detective and this is your crime scene. In this dark, forbidding world, you must collect evidence, take measurements, search for everything from airplanes to drowning victims to murder weapons, and document it all with the same accuracy as a investigator on dry land.
Sound challenging?
Not surprisingly, there's no waiting list to be a state police diver - an extra assignment troopers take on in addition to their regular police duties.
"This takes a very special person," said state police Sgt. Mike Berry, who coordinates and supervises Virginia's seven state police dive teams. "They have to be strong, physically and emotionally.
"You're looking for a man who can do the job against all obstacles - zero visibility, trees, barbed wire, chicken wire, swift current, cold waters - while remembering that his objective is to maintain his focus on the search and accomplish the mission. There's a lot of people who can't do that."
To qualify for one of the dive teams, you must be a state trooper for two years and get a written endorsement from all your supervisors. That's the easy part.
Then comes the real test.
First, an 800-yard swim. Then, 15 minutes of treading water. Next, a 75-foot-long underwater swim without the aid of breathing apparatus (``They hold their breath and swim like crazy," Berry said. "It tells us a lot about their endurance and their ability to focus.'')
Finally, a 1 1/2-mile run, followed by repetitions of pull-ups and sit-ups. It almost sounds like a typical day - if you were decathlete Dan O'Brien.
There's also five weeks of diving school, after which you have enough certification to be on the verge of becoming a diving instructor yourself. Then there's at least a week of refresher training each year.
"A lot of people joke that if it's too deep, too dark, too cold, or too hazardous, call the state police diving team; they'll do it," Berry said. "And they laugh. But I'm proud of it. I'm glad we have a team you can call when it's too deep, or too dark, or too cold."
Rope is your compass
Berry likes to say that his teams' investigations begin where the dry land ends.
That was true enough of a recent search for a murder weapon at Leesville Lake on the Bedford-Pittsylvania County line.
In February, the body of Bobby Carter of Chatham was found in a wooded, secluded area of Bedford County off Virginia 608, near Leesville Lake. Randall C. Faris, 38, of Gretna has been charged with shooting and killing Carter, but no gun has been found.
This summer, the Bedford County Sheriff's Office received a tip that Carter's killer had thrown the gun into Leesville Lake while driving across Toler's Bridge, a popular hangout for drug users and drag racers. Sheriff Mike Brown called in the state diving team to help find the .25-caliber pistol.
Tire tracks, skid marks and graffiti decorate every inch of Toler's Bridge like paint on a canvas by Jackson Pollock. Empty shell casings lie discarded next to spray-painted messages like "Crazy Cooter Loves Cupcake."
Investigator Tim Hayden with the Bedford County Sheriff's Office said his department gets a lot of calls about partying and racing at the short bridge, where people will actually unload race cars off trailers to drag.
"It's dangerous because you have no room for error," Hayden said. "If you blow a tire, you're going off the bridge." The racers are usually long gone by the time police can be dispatched to the remote corner of the county.
Before the local state police dive team entered the water to look for the gun, they performed a re-enactment of the gun toss to determine how far it could have traveled from the 30-foot-high bridge.
"We're assuming that he started down the bridge and threw it from the middle, but that's all we have," Trooper Garland Snead said. "We feel pretty definite that it's here, though."
The state police's gun toss went about 75 yards into the water, so that's where the divers started searching. Snead, who's stationed in Bedford, led the seven-member team in the search because it's his area, even though he isn't the senior diver.
Some of the guys on the team grew up swimming, canoeing, wind surfing, or water skiing. Snead never dove a day in his life, he said, until he joined the team about six years ago. Now his fellow police officers around Bedford County call him "Flipper."
Most of the close-knit dive team have nicknames. One guy is "Q-Tip" because he's tall and thin with white hair. Another is "CP" because he uses his cellular phone a lot. They joke around a lot when they're out of the water, but when they're diving, they are all business.
To start, they don their rubber diving suits and strap on their breathing tanks and regulators. The water is dingy in this section of Leesville Lake, about eight miles southeast of Smith Mountain Lake Dam. Algae, debris and logs drift through. The water level is low, the banks muddy and choked with weeds.
The murky water retains some heat, but the divers must wear their suits to protect themselves from sharp objects such as fish hooks or broken bottles. "I'll lose five or six pounds today" from sweating and dehydration, said Snead, a tall, lanky trooper with a G.I. Joe haircut and a wide smile.
While he and senior dive-team Trooper Jeff Rasnick suit up, other divers set up the search area, marking it with diving flags to warn recreational boaters to keep their distance. It doesn't always work, so divers must always be on the lookout for power boats overhead.
They also put two empty Freon tanks in the water to act as buoys. The buoys are placed about 50 to 75 yards apart, and a rope runs from the bottom of each buoy to a weight on the lake bottom. A third rope runs between the two weights, resting on the bottom.
The troopers dive in teams of two, following the buoy line to the bottom, then grasping the rope on the lake floor with one hand for guidance while searching through the muck with their free hand. The divers link thumbs on the rope and communicate by squeezing - one squeeze for "stop," or two for "go," for example.
"Day or night, that rope is your compass," said Trooper Troy Elder. "Without that rope, it's hard to tell where you're at."
Hands in the mud
On this occasion, Snead and Rasnick are about 25 feet below the surface, in conditions where all they can see is the white rope and tiny twigs floating inches from their faces.
In this way, they move slowly along the floor, searching everything within arm's reach on either side of the rope. If they don't find anything, they ascend up one of the buoy ropes, move the rope and buoys over a little, and search that area, kind of like mowing overlapping lines with a lawn mower.
They call it clearing an area. "When we're done, every inch has had a hand go through the mud," Elder said.
"I could ask that diver 'How many beer cans did you find?' and he'll tell you. 'Where was the biggest tree stump you found? He'll know. Even though he can't see anything except by feel, he knows everything that's down there," Berry said.
"Your mission, when you're called in to search for something, is that your diver can get out of the water and tell you, 'It's not there,' or 'Here it is.'''
In an ideal situation, Snead and Rasnick would find the gun and mark its location by tying it to a small plastic neon yellow buoy called a pelican float. Then, out of the water, they would measure how far from the bridge it was found and sketch the scene and what other evidence, if any, was found.
"It's just like a crime-scene sketch on land," said Trooper Rob Scott. "You'd want to know where the bullets were found."
Finally, the divers would photograph the gun and bring it to the surface, packed in fresh water to preserve any possible fingerprints or trace evidence. All rules for collecting evidence that would apply on dry land, such as documenting the chain of custody and evidence preservation, are adhered to by the divers.
That's a key reason for police departments to ask for a state dive team's assistance, members say. "Some police departments use volunteer rescue divers not trained in evidence recovery, and that can be a problem when you go to court," Snead said.
Snead has worked a variety of dive cases. Most recently, he conducted an investigation into a plane that crash-landed in Smith Mountain Lake. With 2-to 3-foot visibility, Snead swam into the cockpit to look at the controls and search for the pilot's personal belongings. After he recovered her purse, Snead returned to the surface and made a sketch of the crash scene before assisting other divers in raising the plane, using air bags.
Underwater investigating isn't always that easy, though. In addition to such dangers as becoming entangled in their ropes (It's happened to Elder. "You just have to stay focused and work yourself out," he said), getting snagged on underwater wire or tree branches, or running out of air, divers can also have nature work against them.
That's what happened at Leesville Lake. Periodic releases of water from Smith Mountain Lake cause swift, fluctuating currents near Toler's Bridge. Pretty quickly, anything resting on the lake bottom gets buried under the sandy floor, or carried miles downstream.
Snead and the other divers found an old washing machine, cans - everything but a gun.
"They say that current goes 30 miles an hour at times," he said. "If it's there, it's very possible it's been buried under the sand by now."
They haven't given up, though. The divers plan to go back to the bridge and search the bottom with strong metal-detecting equipment and sonar.
"If there's any possibility it's there, they'll want to go back," Berry said. "When they'll give up is when they believe it's not there."
LENGTH: Long : 188 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL Staff. 1. Virginia State Police dive teamby CNBmember Garland Snead plunges into Leesville Lake during a fruitless
search for a pistol police believe was used to kill Bobby Carter of
Chatham. 2. Members of a state police dive team load gear before
heading out onto Leesville Lake. color.