A body tends to sink in the Chesapeake Bay, and then — when decomposition proceeds along its natural path toward oblivion — float.
Unless it’s weighed down with a 4,800-pound Honda Odyssey, 22 feet deep in the Baltimore Inner Harbor.
That discovery last month at the end of Pier 4 is not a cause for mirth, despite wry comments about water quality and swimming.
It is a reminder that the bay and its tributaries — even though we celebrate them and eat from them and swim in them — are places where sometimes life ends. The people who deal with that understand the gravity.
“My job is to go help and bring closure to the family,” said Sgt. Kurt Roepcke, a highly decorated diver with the Baltimore City Police Department. “And not to mess up the evidence if there is foul play involved.”
Living and dying on the water happens in Baltimore, it happens in Annapolis and in rural corners of Maryland where you may never go.
“Officers were called for a report of possible human remains in the water at 4:20 p.m. Monday in the area of Columbia Beach Road at Calloway Drive in Shady Side,” said Marc Limansky, a spokesperson for Anne Arundel County police.
The bay is murky, with visibility limited to 18 inches or less most of the year. Recovering the dead is a complicated and delicate task.
Divers train for years to work in this environment, learning to cover a search pattern blind, salvage vehicles from crosscurrents, communicate with other divers in the water and with support crews on boats or on shore. To tell the difference between a rotting tree and, well, not a tree.
“The harbor is old, we’re finding tree stumps,” Roepcke said. “Sometimes, if the tree has been there a while, it’s soft wood and that feels like a body.”
There are more than 11,600 miles of shoreline along the Chesapeake, and the hardest part of recovering the dead can be knowing where to look. Tides, temperature and currents do funny things.
Twenty-four hours after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed last year, divers found the remains of Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, in a truck under the wreckage in the Patapsco River.
They were among the crew of six workers fixing potholes when the runaway cargo ship slammed into the bridge. Another two months passed before divers recovered their final coworker, 37-year-old Jose Mynor Lopez.
Roepcke was there — and in the Potomac River after an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet crashed near Reagan National Airport in January.
It took a week, working with divers from across the region, to find all 67 passengers and the three soldiers who died that day.
“It’s one big team,” Roepcke said.
Sometimes, recovery leads to answers, if not relief.
In April, the Annapolis harbormaster found a body floating under a pier at Truxtun Park.
It had been in the water a while, said Kortlan Jackson, a spokesperson for the Annapolis Police Department. Clothes dissolve, plastic IDs float away. Skin grows soft.
Police officers carefully collected what they could and tried to take fingerprints. Firefighters pulled the body from the water, sending it to the state medical examiner’s office.
It’s a two-track investigation, looking for who and what.
Six months after they reported him missing in January, family members learned from police that Cameron Isaiah Phillips had drowned. Why and how remain elusive.
“We don’t know exactly how he drowned,” Jackson said.
No one tallies up the bodies pulled from the bay. The Maryland Natural Resources Police, which patrols the entire waterway, only keeps count of the cases when it’s called in to search or help.
A 25-year-old woman in the Magothy River, her boat empty above her. A 73-year-old woman in Dundee Creek, her car in a marina basin nearby. A mystery in the Inner Harbor.
They don’t fit into easy categories.
This is not new, no matter how sensational the discovery might seem at the moment.
“Seventeen days have elapsed since Mrs. Dora White and Miss Alice Shores disappeared from the White home on West street,” the Washington Evening Star reported in April 1911. “Recovered from Spa creek, their hats and umbrella and other articles are the only evidence to indicate what has become of them.”
Searchers combed the bottom mud for the sisters, concentrating not far from the spot where 20-year-old Cameron would be found more than a century later.
Like most bodies in the bay, they turned up, eventually. Sometimes, though, answers just lead to more questions.
One of the sisters drowned, the county coroner decided, the other did not. She was strangled.
The van discovered at the end of Pier 4 in Baltimore has yet to give up much. The body still has no name — not publicly anyway.
Police said a few days after the discovery on July 24 that the Honda came from Waldorf, a city 55 miles south of Baltimore.
The Silver Taxi cab was reported missing in 2014, and it appears the van and its occupant were submerged for years. Millions walked past them, just behind The National Aquarium.
I walked past it on the way to The Banner newsroom.
It’s an odd thing to know there was an unmarked grave there all this time, a tragedy yet to be resolved.
Divers such as Roepcke, the Baltimore police veteran who helped write the training manual for recovery of bodies, come to the scene of a discovery or search with their dry suits and diving helmets, umbilical lines and jackstays.
They bring the tools to return what the water takes, and the drapes and shrouds to provide a little cover for those who were lost, but now are found.
There’s life and death, and then recovery. There’s professionalism and the dignity it can provide.
“This is somebody’s family member you’re returning,” Roepcke said. “We’re not going to bring it up and make a big show of it.”
And there are secrets the Chesapeake still hides.
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