Crime-fighting fish finder
To offset expenses, the Watterses formed a 501(c) (3) nonpronit that collects $10,000 a year in donations “if we’re lucky.” The work also helps market the technology, while giving the couple a feeling of doing a greater good.
The team most often works in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
“We’ve done jobs in just about every state,” Watters said. “This year, we’ve been exceptionally busy.”
Watters parlayed lessons learned working with his father during traditional dragging operations after drownings in developing the underwater search technology.
Team Watters Sonar Search & Recovery is an Illinois-based nonprofit formed in 2005 after the couple was able to use a fish finder to help recover a car and the body of a retired schoolteacher who had disappeared three years before in the Mississippi River in Alton, Ill.
“Immediately, we began getting calls from all across the country for similar-type cases,” he said.
Since then they have floated their specially outfitted boat in lakes and other waterways around the country, uncovering hundreds of
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“They’re very hard to find because they are so small,” Watters said, while adding the missing AK-47 would be larger, thus a more likely find.
They use side-image sonar designed to locate fish and software that crystallizes the resulting images.
Once spotted, the objects are located using GPS and recovered by divers or a salvage operation.
Last time Team Watters was in Warren County, Watters said it located a gun safe stolen in a burglary and dumped off a bridge over Caesar Creek Lake.
“We’ve done a lot of work up there,” he said.
Watters said no gun was located this time, but he was able to follow the trail left by divers who had already assisted in the dragging of Landen Lake.
“We can actually see the footprints they left behind,” said Watters, who also sells the technology to fishermen and law-enforcement agencies.
Team plans to return to Warren County
After searching Landen Lake in the Laghaoui case, Watters said the team, working with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Watercraft, searched a smaller pond, the last one where authorities believe the gun could have been thrown during about seven hours Laghaoui was on the loose.
“We did not nind anything that looked suspicious out there,” he said.”That’s doesn’t mean it’s not out there. It just means we didn’t see it.”
While continuing to search area lakes, investigators in the Laghaoui case are also looking into the possibility that he handed off the gun to someone else before returning to the crime scene, where he was arrested without incident.
Watters declined to elaborate on their next stop, other than to say it was in support of an active homicide investigation in Oklahoma.
He said they continue nine-tuning their technology and plan to employ new tricks in their next trip to Warren County to assist in the Laghaoui case by finding the gun or ruling out the lake “once and for all.”