Divers hunt for trash, find gun on ocean floor

A group of divers hunting invasive lionfish, checking for coral reef damage and cleaning up undersea debris found something unexpected on a recent dive off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea — a handgun.

One of the divers happened to be a Miami-Dade police detective and he found the Beretta, model 92, 9mm semi-automatic pistol half-buried in the sand about 25 feet east of Anglin’s Fishing Pier, said dive organizer Tom Carpenter.

“Once we got ashore we called [the Broward Sheriff ’s Office],” he said. “A deputy came over and checked it out and put it in a bag and took it away.”

The sand-encrusted pistol was not loaded and the magazine was missing, Carpenter said.

“Our experience was that it wasn’t down there too long,” he said. “You can see a lot of bare metal [and] the only sand accretion that’s on there looks like it may have been [under water] maybe a month or so.”

Carpenter — owner of The Beach Diver, a charter business — estimates he’s done about 5,000 dives over the past 10 years in South Florida and said this is not the first time he’s found weapons under water.

“Oh brother, we find all kinds of stuff from GoPro [cameras] to cellphones,” he said. “But the group of weapons that we turned over the last time was to the state park police and they figured somebody was probably coming into the Intracoastal [Waterway] and maybe they saw BSO or the Coast Guard and decided to just dump them real quick.”

Carpenter was referring to handguns and rifles found near the inlet to Port Everglades a couple of years ago. This gun was found last week.

“The chamber was blocked by sand so you couldn’t tell [if it was loaded],” he said. “We didn’t want to disturb the gun too much in case [law enforcement] wanted to check it out.”

Generally, several things can happen to guns that are turned

in to the authorities.

If a gun has been reported stolen, it can be returned to the owner. If it was involved in a crime, it can be held as evidence. If unclaimed, it can be used for police training or it may be destroyed.

Carpenter thinks somebody just got rid of it the easy way.

“It was found within a short distance [of the pier],” he said. “Somebody could have just tossed it off the edge.”

TOM CARPENTER/COURTESY A group of divers found a handgun on a recent dive off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.