Missing Lake Murray Swimmer’s Body Recovered

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (WOLO)–  As the sun beat down on the search team, divers took advantage of the weather to try and find the missing swimmer. Witnesses say a 47-year-old African American male jumped off the boat to swim with two other friends on Sunday but never resurfaced. Monday was the second day crews have been out on Lake Murray looking for the male. They found him around 5 p.m. in about 45 ft. of water. The DNR altered their search because good samaritans had taken pictures of the lake, not knowing they had also taken a picture of where the boat the missing swimmer was on.

“That’s one of the difficulties with a search like this. If you’re off just a few feet, you can miss an individual. When you don’t have anything but wide open expansive water, there’s not something like, ‘hey they were next to that tree’ or ‘hey it was next to that bush.’ There’s nothing they can reference other than we think we were here on the water in relation to the land,” Sgt. Rhett Bickley said, with the S.C. DNR.

New technology has played a big role in the search. The SCDNR has sonar technology so instead of covering 15-hundred square feet in one dive, they can now comb through 16-thousand square feet at a time.   

“The easiest way to explain it is it’s a large acoustic flashlight. It sends out sound beams, and when it sends out sound beams, they bounce back and the computer interprets what it sees. And you’d be amazed, you can identify tires, you can identify tires, you can identify cement blocks. So you can see anything you want to see in water that you can’t see your hand in front of your face 6 inches away, you can see a person you’re looking for 40 feet away,” Sgt. Bickley said.

The DNR says they have all the resources they need.  Richland County, Lexington County, and Prosperity Rescue are assisting in the search– But the challenge is water temperature.  

“The biggest factor we’ve had a negative problem with is that it’s very hot on the surface. The first 15 feet is like bath water, once you cross the thermocline at 30 it gets very very cold,” Sgt. Bickley said.

The Richland County coroner will give more information in the next few days.