Honoring his brother
Man becomes expert in finding the bodies for mourning families of drowning victims
BLACK RIVER FALLS - When Keith Cormican’s phone rings, it’s almost always bad news. Somewhere a fun excursion ended in tragedy. Someone went fishing, swimming, kayaking, canoeing or paddle-boarding and disappeared. Despite lengthy searches, authorities can’t locate a body.
And that’s when Cormican is contacted.
In a way, the Black River Falls dive shop owner is a finder of lost souls. Frantic people with nowhere to turn, who simply want to find their loved one to say goodbye and bury them, reach out to Cormican for help.
He knows how to find people in bodies of water. He’s an expert at using sidescan sonar to find victims. After thousands of hours spent searching for people, he knows when the grainy pictures on his laptop show something on the bottom that looks out of place.
Cormican has a special empathy for grief-stricken family and friends of the vanished and understands the pain they’re going through. He knows what it’s like to lose someone to rushing, cold water.
When he started his search and recovery nonprofit organization four years ago he named it Bruce’s Legacy. Bruce
Cormican was a volunteer firefighter in Black River Falls who got certified in scuba diving in Eau Claire with his brother. Bruce Cormican, who was five years older, encouraged his brother to open a dive shop and they talked of starting a Jackson County dive team.
“We started diving and whenever there was a call out for a drowning in the county my brother would call me,” Keith Cormican, 58, said in an interview at his dive shop.
In August 1995, a man canoeing on a turbulent Jackson County creek drowned while trying to save his daughter, flailing in the rapids. A few days later Bruce Cormican and two other firefighters waded into the water while holding a safety line to search for the man’s body. They, too, were swept off their feet and pulled into a whirlpool.
The other firefighters survived, but Bruce Cormican drowned. He was 40.
In his grief, Keith Cormican vowed to carry out the plan he and his brother started when they earned their scuba diving certification. He helped start Jackson County’s dive unit the year after Bruce Cormican died and has served as the group’s director.
Keith Cormican had been operating a tree landscaping business, but after his brother died he followed through on opening a scuba diving business. He began focusing on training other divers throughout Wisconsin, and when people disappeared in the water he volunteered to find them.
Eventually, he came up with the idea for his search and recovery nonprofit.
Five years ago, Cormican sold land he had inherited and used the money to start Bruce’s Legacy, spending $70,000 to buy a boat and equipment. Soon a friend who worked for an Indian tribe in North Dakota contacted him for help finding a man who had fallen off a pontoon boat. Despite searching for two weeks, he hadn’t been found.
Cormican offered to help, asking for nothing more than his mileage and lodging. He left the next day on a 12-hour drive and within half an hour of searching, he found the man, put on his diving gear and brought him to the surface. That was the summer of 2013. Soon word spread and people began contacting him through
Among them were the families of Ryan Osberg and Bob Glennon, friends who loved fishing for cutthroat trout on Pyramid Lake in Nevada. When they didn’t return from a Jan. 1, 2016, fishing trip, authorities found their truck at the lake and began searching. But two weeks later the search ended.
A week later Cormican was called by Ryan Osberg’s sister Marianne.
“I’ll never forget,” Marianne Osberg said. “He said he’d pack tonight and leave right away. He drove almost 2,000 miles from Wisconsin to Pyramid Lake to help find Ryan and Bob. He was amazing.”
Two days after he started searching, Cormican found the men.
“We’ll never know what happened to them, but to bring them home is huge. Keith having had that experience, he’s been there so he understands exactly what you’re going through,” Osberg said. “He’s the most genuine, caring person and he’s hyper-focused. He’s there to get that person up.”
Bruce’s Legacy’s website recounts search efforts over the last few years. All are heartbreaking, with photos of the vanished smiling, so full of promise and bright futures. This year he’s found drowning victims in California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, South Carolina and North Dakota.
Cormican knows his life took a life-changing turn when his brother drowned and admits that he would never have ended up helping so many families find their loved ones had he not lost his brother.
“I don’t know how to explain it but it’s an honor to honor his memory,” he said, a day before leaving for a trip to California for two separate drownings.
This summer he and his girlfriend Beth Darst spent weeks searching for missing people in California and Nevada, locating a kayaker missing more than two months in 250 feet of water, a 12year-old kayaker who drowned on a church trip and a college football player last seen while paddleboarding a year earlier on Lake Tahoe. They also unsuccessfully searched for a 12-year-old boy who disappeared when struck by a boat while tubing.
Last month they found a man missing for two months after he was thrown from his boat into a lake in South Carolina.
Looking for the vanished is a laborious process that starts with talking to law enforcement and interviewing witnesses. Using an autopilot with GPS, Cormican pulls the 70-pound tube-shaped side scanner sonar on his 22-foot Hewes Craft boat at around 5 mph, methodically driving up and down as if he were mowing a lawn, as the sonar sends images to his laptop computer.
While some people have been gone for days or weeks, he sometimes gets calls to locate someone missing for years and even decades. And sometimes he has to say no because it’s likely the body has washed away or there is not enough information to narrow a search.
“You just have to explain there isn’t much I can do,” he said. “It’s heart-wrenching. I’ve had a father say he’d sell his house to find his son.”
And when he does find someone?
“It’s a very bittersweet moment. Sometimes it takes days or hours,” he said. “There’s a big sense of accomplishment. Now the families can say goodbye.”