THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 20, 1996 TAG: 9608200397
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RICHARD FOSTER, LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LEESVILLE LENGTH: 120 lines
In zero visibility, there's not much but cold, darkness and the sound of your own breath.
Picture yourself blind, deep underwater and weighted down with 50 pounds of equipment, so instead of having a tendency to rise, your limbs sink slightly into the mud and silt. Unseen dangers lie everywhere, waiting to capture and entangle you: tree limbs, fishing lines, barbed wire and sharp, steel support bars jutting from eroded concrete bridges, to mention a few.
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, foreboding vista, 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 land.
Sound challenging?
Not surprisingly, there's no waiting list to be a state police diver - an 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 diving 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 seven state police diving teams, you must be a state trooper for two years and get a written endorsement from all of 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 underwater swim without the aid of breathing apparatus. Finally, a 1 1/2-mile run, followed by repetitions of pull-ups and sit-ups.
There are also five weeks of diving school, after which you have almost enough certification to become 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. Berry likes to say that his teams' investigations begin where the dry land ends.
That was certainly true enough of a recent search for a murder weapin 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 murderer had thrown the gun into Leesville Lake. Sheriff Mike Brown called in the state diving team to help find the small, .25-caliber gun.
Before the local state police diving 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 into the water below the 30-foot-high Toler's Bridge.
``We're assuming that he started down the bridge and threw it from the middle, but that's all we have,'' state police trooper Garland Snead said. ``We feel pretty definite that it's here, though.''
The police's gun toss went about 75 yards into the water, so that's where the divers started searching, led by Snead.
The team donned rubber diving suits and strapped on their breathing tanks and regulators. The water is dingy in this section of Leesville Lake, about 8 miles southeast of Smith Mountain Lake Dam. Algae, debris and logs drift through. The water level is low, and the banks are muddy and choked with weeds.
While Snead and senior diving-team member Jeff Rasnick suited up, other divers set up the search area, marking it with yellow diving flags to warn recreational boaters to keep their distance.
They also put two empty Freon tanks in the water as buoys. The tanks were placed about 50 to 75 yards apart with a rope running from the bottom of each to a weight on the lake bottom. A third rope ran between the two weights, resting on the bottom.
The troopers dived 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 hands. The divers linked thumbs on the rope and communicated by squeezing - one squeeze for ``Stop'' or two for ``Go,'' for example.
``Day or night, that rope is your compass,'' Trooper Troy Elder said. ``Without that rope, it's hard to tell where you're at.''
On this occasion, Snead and Rasnick were about 25 feet below the surface, in conditions where all they could see were the white rope and tiny twigs floating inches from their faces.
In this way, they moved slowly along the floor, searching everything within arms' reach on either side of the rope.
They call that clearing an area. ``When we're done, every inch has had a hand go through the mud,'' Eldersaid.
Ideally, 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 police departments ask for the state diving 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.
Nature worked against the team at Leesville Lake. Periodic releases of water from Smith Mountain Lake Dam upstream 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, bottles - everything but the gun.
They haven't given up yet, 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.
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA STATE POLICE DIVING by CNB