Mysteries remain as anniversary of disappearances approaches

PITTSBURGH » In late 2014, Paul Kochu vanished from the South Side after a night drinking with friends.

His family rushed from their eastern Pennsylvania home to Pittsburgh. For months, they and others, many of them strangers, put up missing person posters, scoured alleyways and riverfronts, and searched through Dumpsters for the 22-year-old. Vigils were held, prayers were said, tears were shed, and even psychics were consulted.

After months of fear, dread and confusion, the mighty Ohio River gave up its sorrowful secret — Paul’s body was found March 19, 2015, floating 85 miles downriver in Wheeling, West Virginia.

In early 2017, the same grim scenario played out for the family of Dakota James, 23, who vanished from Downtown after a night out with friends.

Again there were searches, posters, vigils and prayers. Again, searches by land, water and air turned up nothing. And again, the Ohio revealed an answer — after missing for about seven weeks, Dakota’s body was discovered March 6, 2017, floating in Robinson. Like Paul, Dakota had drowned.

As the anniversaries of the disappearances approach — three years for Paul on Dec. 16 and one year for Dakota on Jan. 25 — both families and Pittsburgh police still do not know what happened.

How could two young men with promise, purpose and personality simply be sucked into a dark void of winter nights, never to be seen alive again?

Did they fall into one of the city’s rivers as police surmise? Did they intentionally kill themselves? Was there foul play? Could these baffling deaths have been at the hands of a serial killer?

The West Virginia Medical Examiner ruled Paul’s manner of death as undetermined because “the circumstances leading up to the immersion of the decedent into the water are unknown.”

The Allegheny County Medical Examiner ruled Dakota’s manner of death as accidental — even though authorities cannot say where, when, why or how he entered the frigid water.

Both families feel their loved one was murdered. They contend Pittsburgh detectives did not adequately investigate their cases and treated them with disrespect. Police say they have no evidence of foul play and dispute the families’ assertions of being unprofessional, but add that they understand how distress can create a mistaken perception.

The mysteries daily rub raw the families’ pain. Losing your child is trauma enough. Not knowing how you lost your child is unbearable, said Jack Kochu, Paul’s father. “Every day a new scenario comes into my head about what could have happened, and that’s a lot of damn days since he went missing.”

STRIKING SIMILARITIES

Paul and Dakota never met, yet their lives, disappearances and deaths were eerily similar.

Both came to Pittsburgh to attend Duquesne University. Paul graduated in 2014 and was about to complete his probationary period as an ICU nurse at Allegheny General Hospital when he went missing. Dakota, a graduate of West Virginia University, was a grad student at Duquesne with plans to attend law school.

Paul was from Bucktown, a rural Pennsylvania village of 2,600 in South Coventry Township, Chester County, five miles south of Pottstown. Dakota, called Koty by friends and family, grew up in Jefferson, Md., about an hour west of Baltimore.

Both had been high school athletes — Paul played baseball and Dakota was a swimmer.

Both were the youngest children in close-knit families — Paul’s older siblings are a sister and a brother; Dakota’s older sibling is a brother. When they vanished, both were only days away from visits with family — Paul had plans to go home for the holidays and Dakota was headed for his family’s vacation residence in Deep Creek Lake, Md.

Both young men were studious, fun-loving and giving, their families say. Neither suffered from drug addiction, mental illness, a medical condition or suicidal ideation that might help explain their disappearances.

Paul lived in the South Side Flats near the Monongahela River and Dakota on the North Side not far from the Allegheny River. Police surmise that each entered the frigid river nearest their apartments — Paul in the early morning hours of Dec. 16, 2014, and Dakota late on the night of Jan. 25, 2017.

Both had been drinking and had blood-alcohol contents above the legal limit of .08 — Paul’s was 0.15 and Dakota’s was 0.214. Neither family believes their loved one’s intoxication level explains them somehow falling into a river.

Indeed, dying in one of the three major rivers in Allegheny County in the winter is a rare occurrence. Statistics from the county medical examiner’s office show that the bodies of only six victims of accidental or undetermined drownings were recovered from the Mon, the Allegheny or the Ohio in winter months during a 10-year span between 2006 and 2016.

One of those victims was Jimmy Slack, 25, a barge worker from Bridgeville, who became separated from a friend with whom he had attended a rock concert at Stage AE on the North Shore on Dec. 6, 2011. Early the next morning, he called another friend and said he was partying but didn’t know where he was.

About seven weeks later, his body was found floating in the Ohio, not far from Stage AE. He had drowned; the manner of death was undetermined. His family declined to be interviewed for this story because of their grief but they, like many others, see the striking and perplexing similarities in the three cases.