A dive team found human remains inside a barnacle-covered car underwater at a Long Island beach — a discovery they think may be linked to a 15-year-old missing persons case.
Dan Pritchard and his diving partner Bill McIntosh — who travel the world looking for missing people — found the remains inside a submerged Chrysler PT Cruiser at Cedar Beach in Mt. Sinai on Monday, prompting an investigation by Suffolk County Police.
The pair believe the remains are Long Island native Robert Long, who went missing in December 2010 at the age of 62 while on a run to a local liquor store in a vehicle that fits the same description.
“It’s obviously a great relief when you identify the vehicle that you’re looking for,” Pritchard told local radio station 1010 Wins. “It is satisfying to know that we can give — hard as the answers are — to the family.”
The pair used kayaks equipped with special side-scan sonar devices that helped look underwater, with McIntosh telling the outlet they had four locations to check and Cedar Beach just happened to be first on the list.
After several hours searching for Long, the pair found what appeared to be human bones in the car — immediately calling police, who conducted their own diving search. They later lifted the vehicle out of the water with a crane after confirming the human remains, according to police.
“We started this morning with the Marine Bureau divers going into the water at low tide,” Suffolk police said. “They examined the interior of the vehicle and tried to recover whatever they could from within the vehicle.”
The remains have yet to be identified, and the Suffolk County Medical Examiner will determine the identity of the remains and perform an autopsy to determine a cause of death, the department said.
“There is a missing person who we suspect this driver to be,” Detective Lt. Kevin Beyrer said Tuesday afternoon. “We made a courtesy notification to the family, but we have not definitively made any sort of identification.”
Pritchard and McIntosh plan on spending the next few months scouring waterways up and down the East Coast in search of sunken vehicles — including several on Long Island. They believe the search could recover the remains of up to 50 missing people.
The discovery at Cedar Beach marked the third vehicle they’ve pulled up during this trip, and the 16th for McIntosh since he first got involved in 2020, the divers said.
“When you find a person, you bring them home and you’re able to close a chapter in another person’s life, a family’s life,” McIntosh told Newsday. “We give them hope.”
