On October 25, 2020, early in the morning, Bob Heikka was on his way home when he suddenly disappeared.
It wasn’t until the following morning when the 70-year-old Florida middle school teacher failed to show up for work—something he would never do—that anybody realised he was gone.
Police conducted a thorough search but were unable to determine Heikka’s whereabouts or cause of death. For over 2.5 years, his family remained in the dark.
This was the case up until this past weekend when he was finally located by a diving master, two volunteer sonar enthusiasts, and a volunteer dive enthusiast.
The Disappearance
When it came to information about Heikka’s disappearance, Michael Sullivan and his team of volunteer sonar experts, known as the Sunshine State Sonar Search Team, were extremely limited: The teacher left his house early on a Saturday, spent the day by himself on the beach, went to an ATM, saw his girlfriend in Orlando, who was about an hour away, and left before dawn on the following Sunday, October 25, 2020.
The only other detail Sullivan had was that Heikka’s mobile had most recently pinged six miles away from his house, in a marshy, wooded region off a state road.
Police, the FBI, and numerous other organisations had already searched the region, but Sullivan told USA TODAY on Tuesday that it is vast and dangerous.
Sullivan and other volunteers spent 12-hour days trudging through briar and bogs while conducting eight different searches for Heikka over the previous seven months. They also looked in dozens of canals, retention ponds, and just about any body of water that could accommodate a car.
On Saturday, their labour was fruitful.
‘We Got Him!’
After searching the region for hours, according to Sullivan, his brother and a diving expert, when Sullivan noticed something through dense vegetation: the roof of a car that was just discernible in a tiny body of water.
“Hey guys, we got him,” I said. Said, Sullivan. “That’s a Chevy Impala, and that’s him!”
At that point, the diving expert Ken Fleming of Recon Dive Recovery put on his equipment to descend below the surface and examine the licence plate to make sure the vehicle belonged to Heikka.
The volunteers recognized the licence plate, so they called the police, who subsequently found both the car and the corpses inside.
On Facebook, Ken Heikka expressed gratitude to the searchers for discovering his brother.
The volunteers were also thanked by the Port Orange Police Department.
On Facebook, the department posted, “Incredible work.” “We were amazed by your professionalism, commitment, and resolve.”
Heikka’s automobile was parked behind dense bushes and trees, some 75 feet from the road. Since his car wound up in the ocean, the region has probably been underwater, and it was only later that it became apparent due to Florida’s unusually dry circumstances, according to Sullivan.
“There’s no way in hell anybody would have ever seen that car before with the water levels at what they were,” he added, adding that he had previously been close by. “You couldn’t even go back there by walking… There was no way to view it at all.
‘A Huge Need’
Heikka and a 53-year-old nurse called Karen Moore who vanished from Davie, Florida in 2001 were both found by Sullivan, who claimed to have started spending his spare time looking for the missing in Florida in June.
In addition to running an auto parts business full-time, he claimed to be working on roughly a dozen additional cases.
“There’s a huge need for this,” Sullivan added. “Resources are scarce for the cops. When someone disappears for five or ten years, family members are left in the dark.
In Florida, there are numerous bodies of water where vehicles can quickly vanish, according to Sullivan, who also mentioned that while conducting searches for the missing, he had discovered scores of vehicles that had been abandoned by criminals.
Many police departments lack the time and resources to carry out the kinds of searches that Sullivan claims he can with equipment he acquired for his hobby.
Now that he has located two missing individuals, he is simply looking to locate more and provide families with some closure.
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He claimed that’s what justifies all the countless hours he spent seeking on his own time.