A Manitoba-based volunteer dive team made the “gut-wrenching decision” Saturday to call off their search for 9-year-old Alex Ottley who went missing mid-February in Lake Erie.
The Hutterian Emergency Aquatic Response Team — commonly known as HEART — reached out to the Ottley family within a day of Alex’s drowning, offering to help find the boy’s body.
Based in Manitoba, the team voluntarily performs drowning-victim recovery across Canada.
After the Ontario Provincial Police ended their 11-day search, the family asked HEART to step in. But to the team’s dismay, they were not able to find the boy, said team leader Paul Maendel.
“We felt quite confident that we’d be able to bring a resolution here for the family to have closure,” Maendel said. “But as the days went by and the weather wasn’t cooperating very well, the equipment was not able to be deployed when we wanted it to.”
Three HEART team members, including Tom Crossmon from a Minnesota dive-recovery company Crossmon Consulting, took part in the week-long pursuit.
No divers were sent out because the team didn’t have the appropriate equipment on hand to deal with the water’s cold temperatures. Instead, they relied on remotely operated vehicles to search the waters — a tool that police usually don’t have, Maendel said.
FULL ARTICLE: Volunteer dive team ends their search for 9-year-old Alex Ottley | CBC News
