![]() ![]() When its captain tried to perform a show-off maneuver off the coast of Giglio Island, Italy, in January 2012, he instead partially capsized it on a reef, killing 32 people. A recent case in which law-enforcement divers played an important role is that of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. In addition to violent crimes, police divers also help stop drug smuggling, participate in anti-terrorism operations, recover abandoned vehicles and even document criminal negligence. The discovery helped connect Griffiths to the murders, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He dismembered his victims in his bathtub and claimed to have eaten portions of all three.Īfter 81 body parts were found in the River Aire near Griffiths’ home, a follow-up search by West Yorkshire Police divers turned up a black canvas flight bag filled with knives, hacksaws, razor blades and a small section of human spine. ![]() Take the story of Stephen Griffiths, the self-described “Crossbow Cannibal,” a 40-year-old psychopath convicted of killing three women in Bradford, England, from 2009 to 2010, shooting one in the head with a crossbow bolt as she tried to escape his apartment. Police divers have extended the reach of justice. Until very recently they were probably right.īut advances in scuba, sonar and other marine technologies, along with an evolution in thinking about the role of police divers - from glorified evidence retrievers to fully trained underwater investigators - have given law enforcement the tools and skills to pursue justice wherever it may lead, even into ancient tar pits. Once it sinks beneath the surface, they might believe, so too does their chance of being caught. ![]() To those who steal, smuggle, rape or murder, a body of water may look like a silent accomplice, an irresistible place to ditch a weapon or a body. Miami-Dade police divers often retrieve submerged autos: Owners dump the vehicles and then report them as stolen in attempted insurance scams. His planned seven-minute dive became a 77-minute dive, and he descended to more than double the 8-foot maximum depth his depth gauge failed at 17 feet. If he succeeded he might help get a murderer off the streets.įor two weeks he and his colleagues had planned and prepared for this moment, but most of that was turned upside down when he entered the water. “I had to immediately close it because I became light headed and nauseous.”īut he also knew he couldn’t quit. “I had my ambient air valve open, and the methane got in,” he continued. They had to pull so hard that I thought my ribs were breaking.” The gas was even more dangerous than the sludge. ![]() “I actually got so stuck twice that they did have to pull me out. “I thought I wasn’t going to make it - that I would get stuck and they wouldn’t be able to pull me out,” Mascarenas said. But diving into the quicksand clutches of viscous green sludge and methane gas that killed creatures 20 times his size? That was madness, and he knew it before he took the plunge. He had been a soldier in the Army and had done just about every job in the LAPD from the gang unit to bike patrol. He was born in the backseat of his father’s car as it sped down Hollywood Freeway toward the hospital. Today they are a popular tourist attraction on the midtown stretch of Los Angeles’ famous Wilshire Boulevard but also, the cops believed, the possible location of a modern-day murder weapon and other critical evidence in a high-profile case. The tar pits were a bubbling cesspool of primordial ooze and a death trap for creatures such as wooly mammoths and saber-toothed cats they had even held the 9,000-year-old skeletal remains of a human. Mascarenas, dive supervisor of the Underwater Dive Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), was about to lower himself into one of the most dangerous and unusual criminal evidence scenes ever entered by a police diver: the La Brea Tar Pits. It was a sunny day in Southern California in June 2013, but it wasn’t just the heat that was bothering him. David Mascarenas was stewing in his own sweat inside a Whites hazmat drysuit. ![]()
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