Authorities investigate 30 submerged vehicles found in South Florida lake
Divers were working on Tuesday, August 8, 2023 to recover vehicles from a lake in Doral, Florida. (Credit: Miami-Dade County Police Department)
An underwater search team specializing in unsolved missing persons cases discovered approximately 30 submerged cars in a South Florida lake over the weekend, police said.
Dive teams from several agencies will recover the vehicles from the lake in Doral and “a thorough investigation will be conducted,” according to the Doral Police Department.
“At this time, it is unknown if these vehicles are linked to criminal activity or how long they have been submerged in the lake,” Doral police said.
A team of United Search Corps divers found the sunken cars while searching the lake this weekend for vehicles connected to unsolved cases under investigation, the nonprofit’s founder, Doug Bishop, told CNN Tuesday.
The lake was one of several hundred locations divers had on their radar to search, and “there just happened to be 32 cars,” he explained. More than 40 open cases are on their radar in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, Bishop said.
The wrecked vehicles were not related to any of the cases they are working on, but police are investigating whether they are related to other crimes, according to Bishop.
“We couldn’t find any human remains or connect any of them to the cases we were targeting,” he said, adding that more data needs to be collected.
Miami-Dade police told CNN that their divers were working Tuesday to recover vehicles from the lake with the help of the Miami-Dade Fire Department.
According to Miami-Dade police, once each vehicle is recovered from the lake, their vehicle identification numbers will be reviewed to determine which department will take over the case.