The retrieval on this Monday afternoon is part of a training exercise for the Morgan’s Point Resort Police Department volunteer underwater recovery team.
Apart from an area marked off by buoys the divers have no clue where the gun and mannequin have been placed.
“It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be real tough,” Medrano said. “There are grid patterns the divers use to locate small items, but finding any small object is difficult in this amount of water.”
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The scenarios are determined by what kind of incidents the divers may have to face in the future and training is a year-round thing. “Twice a month throughout the year the team trains. Whether that be in a controlled dive in the pool, in the classroom or in the lake itself,” Medrano said. “What we primarily do is body and evidence recovery. The training goes on all the time because drownings, burglaries and car dumpings don’t just happen in the summer.
“Last year we pulled out about seven cars. The year before it was four or five,” he said.
The team was the initiative of Chief of Police Randy Dixon of Morgan’s Point.
“What happened was we had had a few burglaries and knew the items had been thrown in the lake back in 2000,” Medrano said. “At that stage there was no dive team, so we had to rely on civilian divers to recover the property as evidence.”
The majority of the Morgan’s Point Resort area is surrounded by water and Bell County has three marinas, so it made sense to get a dive team for local recoveries.
The team covers all of Bell County and is a member of the United States Homeland Emergency Response Organization, or US-HERO. “We can be called out, anywhere between San Antonio and Dallas,” he said. They can be called to other areas as well, as they were after Hurricane Rita slammed the Texas Gulf Coast on Sept. 24, 2005.
Training for diving includes having dive-medics available before anyone gets in the water to ensure each diver is all right. “If someone has blood pressure that is high that is probably not the person we want in the water at that time,” Medrano said.
Meticulous records are kept at every dive and every training session. “Whenever the diver goes into the water we have to record the beginning air pressure, the time they went in the water, the time they came out, the depth that they reached, their total bottom time and their pressure group - these are all very important. This tells us about how long someone can stay in the water. That’s why we keep accurate records of this,” he said. “We can also tell how much oxygen a diver has left.”
The most recent recovery was completed in Temple when 10-year-old Marcus Woodruff drowned in a local pond. The dive team recovered the child’s body at about 11:45 p.m., just 20 feet off the shore.
“We don’t like doing those sorts of recoveries,” Medrano said. “We do hope it can bring some kind of closure for a family, though. Anything to do with kids is tough.”
The 14-man team consists of members of Morgan’s Point Resort Police Department, Killeen Police Department, members of the United States military and volunteer divers.
“We only put one or two divers in the water at the time,” Medrano said.
Too many people in the water at one time causes the bottom of the lake to become stirred up, creating a lack of visibility. “In lakes like Belton and Stillhouse you’re lucky to get 2 feet visibility.”
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Within 45 minutes of the divers going into the water on this Monday afternoon a bright orange float device pops to the surface, letting the ground crew know an item has been located. The gun has been found.
“That was quick,” the proud coordinator said of his teams’ recovery. “The same thing happens when we locate a body. There are several reasons why we want to mark a body,” Medrano explains. “Most of the time we are locating a drowning but what if it’s not a drowning? It could be a homicide,” he said. “When we locate the body we want to mark it. Then we take down the underwater video and camera to take photos for evidence. We check the body for marks and take photos.
“Communications are conducted by using an underwater radio system,” he said. “I can talk to the divers and hear what is happening under there.
“You’d be surprised what is under the water - fishing line and fully-grown trees are our enemies. We can get caught up in them so easily.”
