Adventures with Purpose,
a non-profit that travels the country trying to solve cold cases.
She’s been missing for 23, 24 years.
One hour later, we're in the water, we're diving on it.
I think we just found Samantha Hopper...
and her babies.
How crazy is that you found that so quick
-I knew it. -and it’s been all these years.
Thank you so much.
I have the shoe.
We had some human remains left inside the sock.
OK.
A private search group
travels the country solving underwater mysteries.
All I see...
is my little brother in water.
I really considered it just kind of a one-off thing.
He has a six-year-old granddaughter.
We were telling her that he’s lost and we’re trying to find him.
You have to start thinking outside the box.
Where can you hide a vehicle?
Underwater.
[Super_Users]
[Recovering Underwater Bodies]
My name is Jared Leisek,
and my YouTube series,
has helped bring home people that have been missing underwater
in their vehicles.
We’ve recovered more vehicles in this past year or two
than any other agency across the entire US.
And the keys are still in it!
-Is it really?
When you go into, you know, you identify a target,
your heart starts racing.
Especially some of these that you just know
there shouldn’t be a vehicle here,
and you look at the screen on the sonar, and it’s just like,
“We found what is it we’re looking for today.”
Now you take the time to get suited up.
You aren’t rushed to get to it right away,
but you still have to take the time
to make sure that you go through all your safety checks.
We have a lot of challenges that go along with this as well.
How deep is the vehicle?
The deeper it is, the more risk there is for a diver.
Because of the depth and strong river currents,
they’re unable to place divers in the water.
It’s dangerous.
You have to have the physical strength
to pull yourself down at times.
Bodies also break down.
Depending on the environment,
you’re still going to have a body that is intact
but you can’t always see what you’re touching or feeling.
Checking the back seat.
I cannot reach into the rest of the vehicle.
Everything he’s doing, he’s doing by feel.
We don’t go into the vehicle.
We don’t, you know, we don’t disturb it,
we don’t start lifting it out of the environment.
At that moment in time,
it becomes a crime scene, and we’re hands off.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Call the cops! Call the cops! Call the cops!
Sorry, you guys got to back up now.
There’s a body inside of it.
We’re going to pull a plate number real quick.
For me, diving is not about going under the water
and looking at pretty fish.
For me, it always came down to a purpose—
get in the water and start cleaning up the environment.
I got some good discs today.
It became an everyday treasure hunt.
You never knew what it is that you were going to find,
from cell phones to sunglasses
to the bottles and the pop cans and the trash and the debris.
It was just a lot of fun,
especially when you find a cell phone,
you were able to get it turned on,
and you were able to track down the owner
and just see the joy of, “Hey, I thought that I lost that forever.”
-Do you recognize this? -I do.
I can’t believe that’s still waterproof.
So when we ended up finding that first vehicle,
I said, “You know what? I can lift a car off the bottom.
I can float it down the middle of the river to a public boat ramp.”
It became a challenge.
It wasn’t just the treasure hunt of finding the vehicle.
How can I get this 3,000- or 4,000-pound car
out of the river?
Whoa! Yeah!
Whoo-hoo!
Check, check, check.
Radio check, radio check.
The windows are up. Oh, I think it’s a car.
Another Chevy.
You wanna hold this?
Yeah, yeah, like that.
So now we start doing these YouTube videos of us recovering the vehicles,
and people started reaching out to us and said,
“You know what? We have a lost loved one
that we believe that is underwater in their vehicle.
Do you think that you can help us out?”
Twenty-two-year-old Nathan Ashby
disappeared on the morning of July 31st
after leaving his Warrenton home.
There’s not a day goes by I don’t think about my brother
or wonder where he is.
Initially, when Nathan's family reached out to us,
they were looking for hope.
Many others, including the Warren County Sheriff’s Department,
have searched for Nathan but found nothing.
At this point, I think Nathan’s been missing for eight or nine months.
We made a 32-hour drive to Warrenton, Missouri,
to help find and recover Nathan Ashby.
Becky says the last ping from Nathan’s cell phone came here.
We identify if there’s a vehicle in the water,
then we dive on the vehicle
to see if this is the target that we’re actually looking for.
I’m trying to identify...
if there’s anybody inside here.
Oh shit...
You pull the license plate.
I’m 100 percent for certain that Nathan is in the front seat.
We started at nine o’clock that morning,
and by 6:00 pm, we had Nathan and his truck out of the river.
I... I just needed it done.
And my resources,
I have to rely on fire departments and Border Patrol.
They have safety protocols.
Obviously, you guys have the ability
to operate under total different circumstances.
We have no red tape.
So that’s why we’re able to come in
and offer our services the way that we do.
The 84-year-old Nadine Moses,
who disappeared back in May of this year
in St. Clair County.
These families feel as though they’ve lost all hope.
They feel as though nobody’s helping them anymore.
An unanswered question:
What happened to Nadine Moses?
The case of Nadine Moses,
the family reached out to us.
They were able to provide us with clues.
And they said, “Jared,
we know that our mom woke up around 2:00, 2:30 am.
We know that she made the bed.
We know that she did the dishes,
that it was a normal day for her.
But we also know that she’s aging. She has dementia.”
We deal with a lot of elderly,
that they just simply get confused.
And whether they’re hitting the gas instead of the brake,
or they think that the road is there because there’s fog,
and they end up in the water.
We know that we have a cell phone ping
near downtown Marine City at 5:08 am.
Four minutes later, at 5:12 am,
the phone goes completely offline.
We have somebody with dementia that’s missing with a vehicle...
with cell phone information next to water.
We know that we have a four-minute window
from 5:08 to 5:12.
We know that she’s picked up on CCTV camera heading southbound.
My assumption from all of this is that 5:00 am, it’s still dark.
Was there a little bit of fog? I don’t know.
Did she go in there, and she’s confused,
and she gets turned around?
We come in, and we end up finding her five months later within 20 minutes,
working with these clues that the family provided to us.
Saturday, that missing piece to the puzzle was found.
And one of the first questions that all families ask us,
“How much is this going to cost?”
And most families don’t have
the type of money that it would take if a team like ours was to come in.
And so we really made a decision that,
hey, you know what?
We’re going to do this for free at no charge to the families
because we’ve been able to take this YouTube platform,
we’ve been able to take the Facebook platform.
we’ve been able to sell merchandise
and donations from our viewers.
And the combination of all four of those
has really put us in a position to where we can say,
“You know what? It’s not going to cost you a dime.
We’re going to do this free of charge for you.”
I’m just making sure that for the longevity of all this,
I don’t get PTSD,
and I take proper downtimes,
and I’m able to relax with my family and separate the two.
And it’s a challenge.
Let me tell you, I mean, it’s a huge challenge.
Yes, I've chosen to do this.
It’s not a morbid thing.
It’s a very beautiful, humbling thing.
You’re able to do something for this family
that nobody else in the entire world has been able to do for them.
It’s almost like a superhero power of being able to...
identifying, diving, and bringing that resolution
and those answers that these families needed.
I knew it. I knew it.