A scuba-diving YouTuber has discovered a car containing human remains linked to a cold case of two Tennessee Teenagers who went missing 21 years ago
During a diving mission in Sparta, Tennessee, in late November, 42-year-old Jeremy Beau Sides of the YouTube channel Exploring With Nogs and his team found a black Pontiac Grand Am, inside which had yet to be identified human remains. ,
Two teenagers, Jeremy Bechtel, 17, and Erin Foster, 18, went missing without a trace in the small town of Sparta in 2000.
newly discovered vehicles – which were new York Times The report pertained to Foster – who was recovered by Sides and his team after drowning in the Calfkiller River.
According to the White County Sheriff and The Times, the license plate matched Foster’s missing Pontiac. DailyMail.com reached out to the Sparta Police Department for comment.
Both sides traveled to the small town last month to explore Foster’s Pontiac Grand Am. His entire YouTube channel focuses on recovering lost items from bodies of water, often associated with cold cases.
He said he and his team searched the water and found it using side scan sonar before sending the car to scuba divers to pull it out of the water.
Video of the car’s recovery shows a rusted Pontiac being pulled from the river while still mostly intact. Later they handed over the vehicle and the remains to the police department.
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Pictured: A Grand Am pulled from a river in Tennessee. It follows the cold case of two missing teens who haven’t been seen in 21 years.
Jeremy Beau Sides of the YouTube channel ‘Exploring with Nuts’ found the black Pontiac Grand Am during a dive mission late last month
The vehicle, which the NYT reported, belonged to one of the missing teens, Erin Foster, was recovered by Sides and her team after being submerged in a local river.
Pictured: Jeremy Bechtel, 17, and Erin Foster, 18, at the time of their disappearance
KTFV reported that a team of forensic investigators was collecting evidence from the 1998 Pontiac as of Wednesday.
Although the remains could not be identified as positive as of Saturday, they have been sent for genetic DNA testing for comparison with dental records.
After this both the families have been informed.
“It was like losing him all over again,” Ron Bechtel, 57, Jeremy’s father, said in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday.
‘We just had a little hope that he was still alive.’
Sides said the story has haunted local residents for years.
‘It was a very small town, two teenagers went missing and no one knows where they went. Everybody knew these kids, they went to school with them, you know,’ the sides told wtvf,
‘Half the police officers went to school with these people, they were friends with them. It’s great to see so many people so close together and reacting. It meant a lot to me and I know it meant a lot to all of them too.
Police have continued to look for and follow-up dozens of different leads over the years.
Jeremy Beau Sides, pictured, runs a YouTube channel where he and his team search the waters for items related to missing cars and cold cases.
Pictured: The interior of Foster’s 1998 Pontiac Grand Am, which contains unidentified human remains
Two teenagers, pictured, went missing in the small Tennessee town of Sparta back in 2000
‘Every so often there will be the case where someone disappears from the planet and they disappear in their car. It’s an immediate red flag that chances are, they went into a body of water somewhere,’ Sides explained.
White County Sheriff Steve Page said in a Facebook statement that he told Sides he might be looking in the wrong area when a member of Foster’s family requested the sheriff to watch one of Sides’ videos of him searching for the missing teen. Was. Was.
“The man changed his location on 11/30/2021 at Hwy 84, Calfkiller River, where he later discovered a vehicle and called it the Sheriff’s Page,” the department wrote in a statement posted on Facebook.
‘Contact Sheriff Page’ [Sparta Police] Major John Meadows and his team arrived at the scene within minutes to investigate, confirmed [plate] Vehicle matching.
Meadows is the principal investigator of the case and was one of the teen’s classmates in high school.
Sides said he and his team searched the river and found the car, using side scan sonar, before sending scuba divers out of the water.
The vehicle is believed to have been submerged in water for 21 years, mostly still intact, but with some rust damage as pictured above.
According to local officials, the investigation into the girl’s disappearance is on.
Sides, the YouTube channel that currently has over 138,000 subscribers, says it ‘dives into rivers and lakes, recovers lost or stolen property, cleans waterways, and helps families in need’ is’ helps to close.
In October, Sides teamed up with another YouTube group, Adventures With Purpose, and found a body in a submerged vehicle in Texas, the Times reported.
And in early November, Sides discovered the car of a missing woman, which had been in Oakridge, about an hour from Sparta, since 2005.
That same month, a separate YouTube group called Chaos Divers found an Ohio couple’s car that had been missing for nearly four years.