New Brunswick car found in Alabama creek a 'mystery' to divers
CBC
Divers and law enforcement in the southern U.S. are wondering how a car with New Brunswick plates ended up more than 2,300 kilometres away in an Alabama creek.
An independent group called Chaos Divers spotted the vehicle Sunday under three metres of water and called police, who pulled it out Monday morning.
The Toyota Echo with expired 2002 New Brunswick plates had been floating upside down in Second Creek near Elgin, Ala., a community near the Tennessee border.
Diver Jacob Grubbs was puzzled when he first spotted the licence plates, bearing the name of a place he had never heard of.
"We didn't realize what that plate was, and I was like, 'Where the heck is New Brunswick?'" he said in an interview. "I was unaware of New Brunswick until we searched it. I'm like, 'Oh my god, that's way far away.'"
The group was searching for Janson Brewer, a man who disappeared in the area in 2016 and was never located. A bridge near the creek was under construction at the time of Brewer's disappearance, which prompted the dive team to pick that area.
A sonar scan detected the Toyota completely submerged and a diver searched the vehicle. The group called local police, and they went to the scene the following morning.
Chaos Divers is made up of search and recovery divers who travel around the country looking for missing people in cold cases, while cleaning up waterways. The Illinois-based group documents its findings on a YouTube channel.
Lindsay Bussick, a member of the team, said the French on the licence plate helped her realize it could be a Canadian plate. After looking up New Brunswick, she saw how far the car had travelled.
"Everybody was like 'How in the heck did this car get over 1,600 miles from Canada down here to Alabama?'" she said.
The dive unit of the nearby Florence, Ala., police department entered the water Monday morning and attached straps to the Toyota, which was about 30 metres offshore. It was pulled out with a wrecker.
No sign of human remains was found in the vehicle.
Lt. Joe Hamilton of the Lauderdale County Sheriff's Department said the registration for the car lists the owner as an insurance company in New Brunswick. They've been in contact, but the company is still checking its records to confirm.
"It took a little bit of time due to it being in a different country for us to track down who exactly the vehicle belonged to," Hamilton said in an interview.
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