‘For a good purpose’: Search and recovery scuba diver helps solve missing persons cases

GEORGETOWN, S.C. (WBTW) — Adam Brown is a search and recovery scuba diver who looks for missing people and cars underwater, free of charge.

He’s now been a part of more than 100 vehicle recoveries and is able to fund him and his partner’s non-profit through their social media following. They have more than 1 million followers on Facebook, 700,000 on TikTok and nearly 300,000 on YouTube.

Brown started scuba diving about five years ago. At first, he was simply treasure hunting. He would dive into the rivers of Georgia and South Carolina and see what he could find.

Some of the items he’s recovered along the way include guns, pipe bombs and even relics from the Civil War. Over the past three years, he and his partner Jeremy Sides started a nonprofit to help people search for their loved ones across the country.

Now, their main goal now is to search for missing people and give families the answers they deserve.

“It’s pretty amazing how many cars are actually sunken underwater across the country. It almost feels like every other boat ramp you look at, there’s probably a vehicle out there, whether it’s stolen for insurance fraud or whatever the case,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of cars out there and whenever vehicles go missing with missing people, we tend to look in either the woods or the water just because it’s an easy place to make a vehicle disappear.”

One cold case in particular they helped solve was Daniel Riggs, who went missing in 2015 in Mount Pleasant. Brown and his partner found Riggs’ car in early August near Browns Ferry Landing in Georgetown County after learning where his phone last pinged.

“The equipment they used back then has been improved immensely over the past 10 years. Now you can almost look at your screen, your sonar screen, you can see the shape of cars, you can see if it’s a truck or if it’s a car or not,” Brown said. “In that case, we were looking for an SUV, not a truck, so we were kind of just [doing] process of elimination, starting to dive on anything that looked like an SUV and his vehicle ended up being right there off the ramp.”

Brown said the hope is that maybe these missing persons just wanted to start a new life, and they’ll show up again. But the reality is there’s accidents, mental health issues and many other variables that go into these cases.

“It’s definitely something you have to get mentally prepared for. It’s not for everyone, definitely not,” he said. “But you just have to keep in mind the reasons you’re doing this, which is to help the families out, give them answers, and it’s all for a good purpose.”

On Monday, Brown worked with another partner and discovered a stolen Ford Escape off the Enterprise Boat Ramp near Socastee.

You can follow along @AdamBrownAdventures on Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.

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