Adventures with Purpose | ||||||||||
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YouTube information | ||||||||||
Channel | ||||||||||
Years active | 2018–present | |||||||||
Subscribers | 3.21 million [1] | |||||||||
Total views | 389 million [1] | |||||||||
Website | adventureswithpurpose | |||||||||
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Last updated: 20 July 2024 |
Adventures with Purpose is a group of professional, non-profit scuba divers who use underwater sonar imaging equipment and bathymetry mapping technology to locate missing persons and their vehicles in waterbodies. Originally focused on clean-up, their channel's focus was turned to missing persons cold cases after their accidental discovery of a missing person. The group documents their efforts on their YouTube channel.
Adventures with Purpose (AWP) was founded by Oregon-based Sam Ginn and Jared Leisek in 2019. [lower-alpha 1] [3] They began as an environmental cleanup agency, removing cars that were polluting waterways. [4] [5] Doug Bishop, a diver and manager of a towing company, also joined the group. [6] After twice finding cars with missing people in them, they determined a need to look for people who have gone missing in or with their vehicles. [7] The channel receives tip-offs and requests from the public through their social media accounts. [3] They do not pursue rewards from family or charge the families or police involved, but will not reject rewards if given. [8] Instead, AWP funds its searches through video views, subscribers, donations, and merchandise sales. [5] In 2020, AWP threatened to sue for a $100,000 reward pledged by five anonymous donors for the discovery of Ethan Kazmerzak, who had disappeared in 2013. [9] The Kazmerzak family donated an undisclosed amount. [5]
In October 2022, the team had six members. [7] The following month, Leisek was accused of raping a 9-year-old female relative at age 16–17 in Utah in 1992. Several team members, including Bishop, diver Nick Rinn, [10] and lead videographer Josh Cantu [11] subsequently left the team. [12] [13] On January 5, 2023, Leisek was charged in Sanpete County, Utah. [14] [15]
On January 7, 2023, Adventures with Purpose announced they are on a 3-month tour with a new team of divers and filmmakers. [16]
At the identified waterbody, [17] the team traverse the waters in small inflatable boats, scanning the bottom of the waterbody using sonar. Upon identifying areas of interest, they circle the area for further identification on their sonar displays before using a heavy-duty magnet to attach their line to the sunken vehicle. They mark the location with a buoy and then use divers to make a visual identification of the vehicle, retrieve a license plate, search for bodies, and prepare the vehicle and its contents for retrieval by police. [18]
The team usually deals with cold cases, [19] however they have also volunteered for searches in recent cases; an example would be searching on August 22, 2022, for Kiely Rodni, who went missing on August 6, 2022. [20] Certain recent cases may be incidental while searching the waterbody for a cold case. [21] As of July 2024, the group has solved 33 missing person cases (the chart below counts mother Samantha Hopper and daughter Courtney Holt as one case.) [21] AWP also sometimes cooperates with other teams with the same purpose, such as Exploring with Nug, Chaos Divers and Sunshine State Sonar. [22] [23]
Diving activities are the things people do while diving underwater. People may dive for various reasons, both personal and professional. While a newly qualified recreational diver may dive purely for the experience of diving, most divers have some additional reason for being underwater. Recreational diving is purely for enjoyment and has several specialisations and technical disciplines to provide more scope for varied activities for which specialist training can be offered, such as cave diving, wreck diving, ice diving and deep diving. Several underwater sports are available for exercise and competition.
Professional diving is underwater diving where the divers are paid for their work. Occupational diving has a similar meaning and applications. The procedures are often regulated by legislation and codes of practice as it is an inherently hazardous occupation and the diver works as a member of a team. Due to the dangerous nature of some professional diving operations, specialized equipment such as an on-site hyperbaric chamber and diver-to-surface communication system is often required by law, and the mode of diving for some applications may be regulated.
The Doe Network is a non-profit organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement to connect missing persons cases with John/Jane Doe cases. They maintain a website about cold cases and unidentified persons, and work to match these with missing persons.
Underwater diving, as a human activity, is the practice of descending below the water's surface to interact with the environment. It is also often referred to as diving, an ambiguous term with several possible meanings, depending on context. Immersion in water and exposure to high ambient pressure have physiological effects that limit the depths and duration possible in ambient pressure diving. Humans are not physiologically and anatomically well-adapted to the environmental conditions of diving, and various equipment has been developed to extend the depth and duration of human dives, and allow different types of work to be done.
Jennifer Joyce Kesse is an American woman from Orlando, Florida, who has been missing since January 23, 2006. Shortly after she vanished, Kesse's car was discovered parked around a mile from her home. Security footage recorded her kidnapper parking Kesse's car and walking away, but he could not be identified due to poor camera quality and the absence of any visible distinguishing physical features. The case received local and national press attention.
Vortex Spring is a commercially operated recreation, camping and dive park located near Ponce de Leon, Florida. It is the largest diving facility in the state of Florida.
Maura Murray is an American woman who disappeared on the evening of February 9, 2004, after a car crash on Route 112 near Woodsville, New Hampshire, a village in the town of Haverhill. Her whereabouts remain unknown. Murray was a 21-year-old nursing student completing her junior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time of her disappearance.
Recreational dive sites are specific places that recreational scuba divers go to enjoy the underwater environment or for training purposes. They include technical diving sites beyond the range generally accepted for recreational diving. In this context all diving done for recreational purposes is included. Professional diving tends to be done where the job is, and with the exception of diver training and leading groups of recreational divers, does not generally occur at specific sites chosen for their easy access, pleasant conditions or interesting features.
The Texas Killing Fields is a title used to roughly denote the area surrounding the Interstate Highway 45 corridor southeast of Houston, where since the early 1970s, more than 30 bodies have been found, and specifically to a 25-acre patch of land in League City, Texas where four women were found between 1983 and 1991. The bodies along the corridor were mainly of girls or young women. Furthermore, many additional young girls have disappeared from this area who are still missing. Most of the victims were aged between 12 and 25 years. Some shared similar physical features, such as similar hairstyles.
Amy Marie Yeary was an American woman whose body was discovered on November 23, 2008, near Campbellsport, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin. Her body remained unidentified for 13 years before investigators announced her identification via forensic genealogy and dental records on November 23, 2021.
Susan "Suzy" Poupart was a Native-American woman who disappeared in May 1990. Her body was discovered six months later. The murder currently remains unsolved, although a man was taken in for questioning for her death in 2007. Additionally, another pair of men are under suspicion.
Tammy Corrine Terrell was an American murder victim from Roswell, New Mexico. Her body was discovered on October 5, 1980, in Henderson, Nevada, and remained unidentified until December 2021. Her case has been the subject of extensive efforts by investigators and has been highlighted as inspiring other work to solve cold cases of unidentified murder victims.
Unidentified decedent, or unidentified person, is a corpse of a person whose identity cannot be established by police and medical examiners. In many cases, it is several years before the identities of some UIDs are found, while in some cases, they are never identified. A UID may remain unidentified due to lack of evidence as well as absence of personal identification such as a driver's license. Where the remains have deteriorated or been mutilated to the point that the body is not easily recognized, a UID's face may be reconstructed to show what they had looked like before death. UIDs are often referred to by the placeholder names "John Doe" or "Jane Doe". In a database maintained by the Ontario Provincial Police, 371 unidentified decedents were found between 1964 and 2015.
Alisha Ann Heinrich, previously known as "Baby Jane" and "Delta Dawn", was a formerly unidentified American child murder victim whose body was found in Moss Point, Mississippi, in December 1982. The child — aged approximately 18 months — was partially smothered before she was thrown alive from the eastbound Interstate 10 bridge into the Escatawpa River, where she ultimately drowned. Her body was recovered between 36 and 48 hours after her death.
DNA Doe Project is an American nonprofit volunteer organization formed to identify unidentified deceased persons using forensic genealogy. Volunteers identify victims of automobile accidents, homicide, and unusual circumstances and persons who committed suicide under an alias. The group was founded in 2017 by Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press.
The Lewis–Clark Valley murders refer to a cluster of unsolved murders and disappearances that occurred in the Lewiston-Clarkston metropolitan area of northern Idaho between 1979 and 1982. Law enforcement investigators have identified four victims and possibly a fifth that are connected to a single suspect.
Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel were two American teenagers from Sparta, Tennessee, who disappeared in April 2000. Their remains were eventually found in Foster's submerged vehicle in the Calfkiller River in 2021 by Jeremy Sides, a volunteer civilian cold-case investigator and YouTuber.
Jeremy Beau Sides, aka "Nug" from the YouTube channel Exploring with Nug, is an American scuba diver and civilian crime investigator who investigates missing person cases and missing items. In 2021, he found the bodies of Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel, who had been missing for 21 years.
Colin Frederick Campbell is a British double murderer who in the early 1980s abducted two separate and unrelated women in west London and killed them in sexually motivated attacks. In 2013, 32 years after the event, Campbell was convicted of the high-profile unsolved murder of 17-year-old Claire Woolterton after a DNA match was found to him. He was already in prison for the 1984 killing of Deirdre Sainsbury, but had had his murder conviction in this case downgraded to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility in 1999 after he claimed that he had only killed her due to having an epileptic fit.
Joshua Guimond is an American man who disappeared on the night of November 9 and 10, 2002, after leaving a party hosted in a dormitory of Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He was a 20-year-old junior student at Saint John's, who was partying with friends in the campus' Metten Court dormitory building. He left the party around 11:45 p.m. on the 9th without saying anything. When he did not return, the students at the party assumed that he had gone to sleep elsewhere. The walk to his dormitory, St. Maur, would have taken about three minutes. He was last seen around 12:15 to 12:30 a.m. on the 10th, on a bridge near Stumpf Lake, which is located in between the two buildings.