The truck of a man missing since 2008 was recovered from the Green River at the Joe Pruden Boat Ramp in Spottsville on Thursday.
And according to an article from the Owensboro Times posted Friday afternoon, skeletal remains found in the truck Friday morning were believed to be of 91-year-old Charles Haywood, who had been reported missing to the Owensboro Police Department on July 31, 2008.
The 2002 Ford Ranger belonged to Haywood, and the Owensboro Police Department has been investigating his disappearance since he’d gone missing, said Henderson County Sheriff Chip Stauffer.
The call that was put out by 911 Dispatch a bit before noon on Thursday piqued Stauffer’s curiosity. He said it went something like this: “2002 Ford Ranger connected with a 2008 missing person found at Spottsville.”
Stauffer said he was the first local law enforcement to arrive at the boat ramp.
There, he learned that a private diver, Trey Lombardo, had launched his boat, and using sonar, he’d located the truck. Then Lombardo dove to the truck, connected a magnet to it and tied off a line with a buoy to show a location where the truck was underwater.
Stauffer said Lombardo initially made the call to the Daviess County dispatch, where officials there relayed the message to the local dispatch.
Lombardo runs a business called Narked Divers. From his website, “The work is simple: deploy sonar technology and professional dive operations to find missing people, locate submerged vehicles, and help law enforcement close cases that have been open for years. Sometimes decades.”
Lombardo also documents his work on his YouTube channel.
Divers with the Ohio Township Fire Department came from Newburgh Thursday afternoon to get the truck tied up so that it could be pulled out of the water, Stauffer said.
That took hours, Stauffer said. Though the divers and emergency personnel had a general understanding of where the truck when above the water, the truck was 35 feet below, sitting on the bottom of the Green River, the sheriff said. Divers were dealing with the current of a river above the flood stage and had six inches of visibility, he said.
Also, the magnet that had been attached to the truck had come off and the buoy was gone, so rescuers up top were radioing directives based on where the buoy had been and based on where the divers air bubbles were surfacing, Stauffer said.
Stauffer said the Ohio Township divers went in about 1:30 p.m., and when it was all said and done, it took another six hours to get to the truck and get the straps placed securely around the wheel axles. Once the straps were in place, it took a recovery machinery from Tri-State Towing and Recovery about 30 minutes to bring it out of the water, Stauffer said.
The truck was then set on a flat bed, secured and covered, and taken to the OPD’s indoor controlled evidence garage, Stauffer said. He added it was OPD’s case, and the evidence would beter be handled at its facilities with evidence technicians than at the boat ramp.
Reached Friday afternoon, Lombardo said he first located the truck on Wednesday evening. But his boat, which had been anchored, came loose, and he had to take a swim, he said.
He had the truck marked before the boat took off, but when he returned, he knew he was too fatigued to do anything more that evening.
Returning the next morning, Thursday, Lombardo went in with scuba gear, dove down to the truck, made sure the windows were intact and scooted around it until he reached the back bumper and found the license plate and brought it up to the surface. Then, he called Daviess County dispatch.
When Ohio Township FD divers came hours later, Lombardo said, they dealt with a water level that was rapidly rising, three barges passing by and much more debris and tree trunks floating by than he had. He said it was a much more dangerous situation for them than it had been for him.
An Owensboro Times article posted Friday afternoon said that there were skeletal remains found in the truck Friday morning, and it is believed to be of Charles Haywood. It said positive identification is pending DNA testing and dental record comparisons through the Kentucky Medical Examiner’s Office in Louisville.
