Myrtle Beach man uses sonar device to help solve second unsolved case in six months

GEORGETOWN, SC (WPDE) — The car of a man missing since 2015 was found at the foot of a boat dock in Georgetown.

The discovery was made by a Myrtle Beach man who built a sonar device out of a boogie board and used it to scan waters in the hopes of providing a way out of the crisis for families in need.

Within six months, four families have received answers to a question that has been asked for years: “Where is our missing relative?”

Those answers came with the help of JasonSouhrada and a nonprofit search and rescue team based in Columbia called Adam Brown Adventures.

“I wanted to test the new batteries because the engines gave up pretty quickly,” Souhrada said.

ABC15 first spoke to Souhrada in June after his sonar device found a car with three missing men inside at the bottom of a North Carolina creek – closing a 40-year-old unsolved case.

Since then, he has used his free time to explore the waters along the Grand Strand.

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“We took it to the nearest boat launch, which was down here on Bay Road and Enterprise. I just threw it in the water, I wanted to be productive with it, so I went and searched the area, and sure enough, there was a car in the water,” Souhrada said.

It turned out that the car was stolen, but this inspired him to search for missing people in the area.

“I called my diver friend Adam Brown of Adam Brown Adventures in Columbia to ask if he wanted to come down and dive because I had done some research and heard about Daniel's case,” Souhrada explained.

According to Mount Pleasant Police investigators, Daniel Riggs was last seen on November 9, 2015, when he purchased a quart of oil at a Food Lion in Myrtle Beach.

According to a police report, Riggs told his girlfriend at the time that he was in Georgetown, and investigators confirm that his cellphone was last located in that area.

“I decided to follow those phone signals and go back to the boat dock down in Georgetown,” Souhrada said. “We went into the water there and immediately found several vehicles. I think there were almost 25 in total, if not more, within a quarter mile of the boat dock.”

“We decided to send down an underwater drone that Adam could use to expedite the search for the vehicle he was looking for. It was Daniel Riggs' Dodge Nitro. The third vehicle we examined turned out to be Daniel's vehicle. Adam dove in, wrote down the license plate number and we contacted the police,” Souhrada explained.

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The Georgetown County Sheriff's Office arrived at the scene, assisted Brown in recovering the vehicle, and confirmed that it belonged to Riggs.

Inside the Nitro: The human remains are Riggs, according to Chase Ridgeway of the Georgetown County Coroner's Office.

Souhrada and Brown both describe their work as bittersweet.

“There's so much water that needs to be checked, and the reality is that's not always possible,” Brown said. “So private teams like us come. We don't charge the families anything, you know. We just come on our own dime, on our own time, and we just try to do whatever we can to help.”

“That's why I started doing this. I saw other people doing it on YouTube and I wanted to have that same feeling – I wanted to be able to help,” Souhrada said.

Souhrada has this advice for anyone looking for a missing person.

“It's really important that family members keep searching and keep making news stories about their missing loved ones because that goes a long way in keeping the story fresh. When people like me, Adam or any other search team go out searching and see a car in the water, they wonder if that could be the missing man,” Souhrada said.