The sun had not yet set on the Sacramento River when the team from Adventures with Purpose pulled their boat back into the water. They had already pulled a truck from the river that morning, one of seven vehicles connected to missing persons cases they were working in the area. Now, at seven in the evening, they were heading out again, this time with a plan to methodically sweep the eastern bank of the river from Clarksburg boat ramp upstream, covering a stretch they had not yet fully searched. The goal was to identify as many submerged vehicles as possible, marking them with magnets so that divers could return the next morning.
The work was slow, precise, and driven by a simple hope: that somewhere beneath the murky water lay answers for families who had been waiting for years. The search covered a remarkable set of cold cases. One involved Julie, who disappeared in January of that year after visiting her mother in Elk Grove. She had driven home in her 2005 Toyota Camry, emptied her bag, and left without her phone—something she never did.
Another case stretched back to 1978, when Norma and her two children, Thomas and Richard, vanished in a 1965 Pontiac Lemans. She was known to take the children for drives on warm days, and the team considered whether she might have stopped near the river and accidentally gone off the road. Then there was Carmen Neilson, who had actually been seen driving her Honda Civic on River Road before she vanished. John Atkins disappeared in 1973 while driving south from Freeport Bridge toward Paintersville, a man in his late thirties with a history of heart problems, and his family believed he may have suffered another attack and ended up in the water.
And Yuri Cantou was last seen in Thornton, heading north in a 1989 Chevrolet pickup. These were just a few of the cases the team was juggling, all centered on a stretch of the Delta where they had already stumbled upon at least one missing person by accident months earlier. The driving force behind the operation was an organization founded in 2018, originally nothing more than a small river cleanup project. The founder had set a personal goal of removing two thousand pounds of trash from the river in three months and hit it within weeks.
That success led him to Portland, where he began scanning rivers for abandoned cars and pulling them out of the water. When families saw that he could find and recover vehicles, they started reaching out, asking if he could help locate loved ones believed to be in the water. The first family to contact him asked how much it would cost. By then, the founder had already heard stories of private investigators and others charging desperate families for false hope.
So he made them an offer: they would not be charged a cent, but in exchange, the search would be documented and shared online so other families could find them. Every family since had agreed. No family was ever charged, no police department was ever billed, and no human remains were ever shown on camera. It became a final option for families who had nearly given up hope.
Once on the water, the team relied on sonar, a combination of side-imaging, down-imaging, and a live scope that showed objects in real time. The side-imaging reached seventy-five feet in both directions and revealed shadowy shapes on the riverbed. The down-imaging showed how tall an object was. The live scope allowed them to hover directly over a target and determine whether it was a car or just a rock.
Searching a river was far harder than searching a lake. The current constantly pushed the boat, making it impossible to approach a target at a clean angle, and the wind added to the difficulty. The team had learned from experience that most vehicles were found roughly twenty-three meters from the bank, pushed there by the current after someone drove off the road. Scanning was best done where the sloping riverbank met the flat riverbed, because that was where cars tended to come to rest.
Halfway through the evening search, the sonar picked up a clear shape. Four tires came into view, then the unmistakable outline of a vehicle lying upside down in about eleven meters of water. The boat fought the wind and the current to get into position, and the crew repeatedly tried to snag the car with a magnet. Time and again the magnet dragged off target, hooked onto rocks, or slipped past the frame.
The struggle was a perfect demonstration of why river recoveries were so difficult. Eventually, after multiple attempts, they managed to get a hook set. The car was marked for the morning dive, and the team returned to the campsite for the night with one confirmed vehicle already logged. At first light, the team was back on the water to identify what they had found.
The vehicle was upside down and partially buried, with the driver’s side windows inaccessible. It carried an old Toyota emblem, and the team judged it to be from the 1970s. A license plate was not visible, but the condition of the car suggested it had been on the riverbed for at least twenty years, possibly longer. By that afternoon, they had found the remains of what looked like a newer Toyota Camry, one that had sunk deep enough to be hidden but not so deep as to have sat for decades.
That led them to think of Julie. Then they found a second vehicle beside it, older and more obscured, and they marked both with magnets for closer inspection. The decision was made to call Carmen Neilson a confirmed find. The Honda Civic with the license plate matching her case had been located, upside down, in the area near River Road where she had last been seen.
The team contacted their main coordinator, who put them in touch with the California Highway Patrol. A dive team was nearby, and they began coordinating the recovery. The plan was to attach chains to the rear wheels, connect them with a swivel, and use a line anchored to a buoy positioned about twelve meters downstream from the car. The water was cold, the current steady, and the vehicle stuck stubbornly in the mud.
It was hard, physical work, and there was no guarantee the car would come free in one piece. But they had found her, and that was the part that mattered. For the families, for the searchers, and for the quiet stretch of the Delta where so many cars had come to rest, it meant that one more case had moved one step closer to an answer.