Solidarity in grim search
Family and volunteers still looking for body of latest CBBT over-the-side victim
It’s not a pleasure day on the water. It’s a mission. The boat is silent. Only the roar of the engine.
“I’m used to people coming out on the boat laughing and joking and having a good time,” Ben Shepherd says.
Shepherd, 35, is a Virginia Beach charter boat captain — one of the volunteers who’s been trying to find the body of Erik Mezick, the Maryland man whose truck punched through the guardrail of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel on Dec. 29.
Shepherd didn’t know Mezick. Never met the family before the accident. Yet he’s been out here looking multiple times because “I just felt it in my heart.”
The “Notorious” — Shepherd’s 31-foot Cape
Horn — picks up speed.
It’s Thursday — nine days after the accident — and he’s heading Debris toward from up on First Mezick’s the Landing sand truck near State washed there. Park. Maybe his body finally has, too.
The faster the boat goes, the deeper the wind cuts and the colder the 42-degree day feels.
The bay is almost deserted. Little more than container ships and the birds that wheel are overhead. In the distance, the CBBT stretches toward the Eastern Shore
— 17 miles of bridges, trestles and tunnels dividing the huge bay from the vast ocean. Mezick went overboard near mile marker 14. He could be anywhere by now. On the Notorious, all eyes are down, scanning the dark water.
CBBT records say Mezick’s accident is the 16th over-the-side, with only a handful of survivors. Most cases end with bodies being recovered — usually within hours if the victims remained in or near their vehicles, or a few days if they wound up separated.
Mezick’s crash, on the northbound span, was witnessed by a driver on the southbound span, who stopped at the nearest pull-out and grabbed one of the facility’s emergency phones, linked directly to its control center.
Armed with a rescue ring and life vest, personnel rushed to where Mezick’s truck had gouged a 136-foot hole out of the guard rail.
They could see him on the surface, outside the cab of the barely floating truck, but he appeared “unresponsive,” Tom Anderson, the CBBT’s deputy director of operations, says.
The 20-foot box truck — Mezick was driving a dairy delivery route — sank between the CBBT’s twin spans. Mezick himself was drifting west, toward the bay, when he went under.
Cold water — in the mid-40s that day — and the particularly rough conditions found in the area where he landed would quickly overwhelm even an uninjured person.
“It’s like a washing machine right there,” says Ray Cardone, who owns the Miss Jennifer, a 49-passenger head boat based at Cherrystone campground on the Eastern Shore.
Shoals. Sandbars. A jumble of currents ripping through the mouth of the bay. “The water doesn’t know which way to go there,” Cardone says. “It can be horrible.”
All that also is making Mezick’s body harder to find. Cold water acts like a refrigerator, delaying the decomposition process that typically brings sunken bodies to the surface within days. Hidden in the depths, they can be moved unseen for miles by winter storms and powerful currents.
“My brother was never found,” says Richard Spruill, whose younger brother, Jeffrey Spruill, died at age 20 trying to rescue a man who was drowning off Lynnhaven Inlet in January 1994.
“When the tide goes out of that bay, it’s like taking a shallow bowl of water and tipping it on its end,” Spruill says. “All of it just rushes out so fast.”
He hopes the search for Mezick has a better outcome. No family should be left with an empty coffin.
“This is one of those rare times when you can really say ‘I know how someone feels.’ ”
Less than two weeks ago, Ben Shepherd and Kevin Mezick were strangers. Now, the charter boat captain and the brother of Erik Mezick speak at least once every day.
Shepherd got involved after the Coast Guard called off the initial, multiagency search about 30 hours after the accident, when the odds of success had dwindled too much. While Virginia Marine Police have continued combing the bay, Mezick’s family took up the hunt and asked for volunteers.
Others have joined in, with private boats coming from as far away as Delaware. Bay Land Aviation, out of Maryland, is sending up planes to scout when it can.
But Shepherd has been particularly steadfast, taking Kevin Mezick out with him or going alone.
“Ben has been a godsend,” Kevin’s wife, Nicole, says.
Shepherd says he just hopes someone would do the same for him. He’s lived in the area most of his life and was raised on boats. He knows these waters.
“A friend of mine sent me a picture of the truck in the water,” he says. “It sucks that we weren’t out that day.”
Kevin Mezick is haunted by the thought of his brother lost at sea. They were especially close — with only 11 months between them — part of a tight-knit family living near Salisbury, Maryland.
They’d talked the night before the accident — just about “brother stuff ” — before Erik left on his twice-a-week overnight run for Cloverland Greenspring Dairy. He’d started the job in March, a route that covered 180 miles and called for crossing the CBBT twice.
Kevin Mezick says his brother never mentioned any worries about the bridge-tunnel, where winds can howl so fiercely the whole thing is sometimes shut completely.
“He absolutely loved” his job, Kevin says.
It was a low-pressure gig, perfect after an early retirement from Wicomico County Correctional Center, where he worked as a prison guard. He and Megan, married for 20 years, have two children, both now teens.
Those who knew him say he was a dedicated family man, a cut-up and a character who’d spend time talking to anyone he met. He developed lymphoma last year, but beat it.
“He kept right on persevering through,” Nicole Mezick says. “That’s why this tragedy is so hard to overcome.”
Kevin Mezick learned of the accident from a friend, who saw a report on the internet. As soon as he realized it was a Cloverland truck, he knew it was his brother — the only one from the company with that route.
On the morning Mezick died, he was on his way home with an empty truck. It was blustery on the
CBBT, but no traffic restrictions were in place. The bridge-tunnel uses a six-level system that clamps down on certain types of vehicles as wind escalates. An over-the-side that happened nearly four years ago — a trucker named Joseph Chen in 2017 — led to a $6 million lawsuit that has yet to be decided.
But at the time Mezick’s truck went overboard, CBBT officials say, the facility’s wind gauges were clocking nothing above 30 mph. A truck like his is allowed to cross until sustained winds hit 47 mph.
CBBT police are still trying to figure out what happened. Mezick’s family would surely like some answers.
They wonder if even a 30 mph wind was enough to turn his empty box truck into a sail. Or maybe he fell asleep. Or suffered a medical emergency of some sort — a heart attack or a stroke.
For now, their focus is on getting him home.
“It’s a big pond,” Shepherd says. “It’s gonna take a lot of help.”
Col. Matthew Rogers of the Virginia Marine Police worries about the volunteers.
“They’ve got to be careful,” he says. “It can get dangerous out there very quickly. It could turn into another tragedy.”
But Shepherd is a professional: “I’ve got a boat big enough to go out and be safe about it.”
It’s equipped with a tower — a good vantage point. Binoculars help but the water can still play tricks on the eyes.
He’s trolling near First Landing when word comes: something that looks like a body has been spotted off Fisherman Island, near the Eastern Shore. A driver on the bridge-tunnel called it in.
Shepherd hurries down from the tower and plants himself in front of the wheel.
“We’re gonna cover a lot of ground,” he warns, then punches the throttle.
The bay is reasonably calm. Water splashes into the boat, but he’s making good time. The bridge-tunnel looms larger and larger. Massive barnacle-encrusted pilings. A guardrail that looks like toothpicks. An eerie feeling under the gap where Mezick fell through. Shadowy, rolling water where he took his final breath.
Shepherd stops near Fisherman island, where men in two boats are scanning the area. One boat holds the marine police. The other belongs to Kevin Mezick, out searching on his own today.
They spot each other. Come together to talk. There is no body. A false alarm.
Shepherd motors home in the setting sun. He’ll resume the hunt as soon as he can.
There’s a $10,000 reward for anyone who finds Mezick’s body. Shepherd signed on well before the money was raised and offered.
Kevin Mezick, in the throes of grief and desperation, will never forget that.
“He’s gonna be my friend forever.”