Criminal - Deep Dive

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

Sgt. David Mascarenas is the Dive Supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's been diving his whole life, and prides himself on never refusing a dive, no matter how treacherous. At least until the summer of 2013, when a murder investigation led him into the unusually murky waters of the La Brea tar pits. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Our diving aspect is not like what most people think, that you go down recreationally and you can see 100 feet and the water's warm and all that good stuff. Our average dive, the waters are cold off our coast, so we're wearing, you know, 7-millimeter, quarter-inch wetsuits, and most of the time our visibility is less than a foot. He started scuba diving in high school, performed waterborne operations in the military, and then joined the LAPD, where he's worked in a lot of different units. The crash unit, anti-gang unit, bike patrol in Hollywood. But no matter what department he was working with, he could be called away at any time to go on a dive. I have been in underground watersheds that are about 100 feet wide by 200 feet long by almost 100 feet deep that are

completely enclosed in cement and had to be lowered in by a rope to get in there and do investigations. That's kind of troubling when you know that there's no escape if you have an issue. I have been in dams, you know, on top of mountains. I have been in the LA River searching for bodies. I've had to be deployed by helicopter, you know, into the ocean and do giant strides off the piers. We pretty much do everything in our department because we try not to say no to an investigation if at all possible, because then we're sending a message that, hey, this is a good idea to dump evidence here. But in the summer of 2013, the LAPD dive unit got a call that sounded so unreasonable, it had to be a joke.

Detectives had gotten a tip on a high-profile murder case, a case they still aren't releasing many details about. The murder happened in 2011, and the investigation had gone cold. Until they got word that evidence may have been thrown in the La Brea tar pits. It was like being asked to scuba dive in a pit of toxic, cold molasses. How could you even see in it, let alone breathe? And at first, you know, we were joking about it. I was like, yeah, that's not really going to happen.

There's no way we could pull that off. But once we receive a request from a detective to do an investigation, my job is to see if that's something that we can do. I would feel like that would be something to just say, I'm sorry, that is absolutely nothing we can do. Well, keep in mind that, yes, we're the underwater dive unit, but there's a lot of things that we can do that might not necessarily mean we have to do a dive investigation. We have remote operated vehicles. We have accessories and equipment that we can deploy sometimes. And nobody knew if anything would function or not. Everybody's best guess was no, nothing would work. When he says everybody's best guess was no, he means everybody. This was an all-hands-on-deck analysis. The L.A. Fire Department, Port Police, Beach Police, geologists, archaeologists, diving experts, and even the people who design the underwater search equipment.

Their concern was that those remote-operated vehicles emit small electric sparks. Even when they're supposed to be airtight to go underwater, no one could be certain they wouldn't let off sparks that might cause an explosion and set the whole tar pit on fire. They tried other options, hooks and grabbers, magnets. Nothing worked. But they were able to use a sonar system to confirm that the pieces of evidence were in fact down there in the tar. So now we were in a situation where we have identified items that need to be looked at, and we can't retrieve them via equipment. So we decided that maybe we would try to put a diver into the tar.

I mean, did you stand around and pick straws? Or did you think, you know, this is my call? How did you get chosen to do this? Well, at that time, I was the OIC, the officer in charge of the investigation. If this is a scenario where I could be asking somebody to go in harm's way, and most likely they're not going to come back from it, how would I feel being the person that makes a phone call and says, I told my officer to do that, and did it and knowing he's most likely going to get hurt and he does. And then I have to deal with the family.

So I decided if anybody was going to do it, it was going to be me. And that way nothing could possibly come back. If I get injured or I don't come back, well, it was my decision. Did you stop and are you married? I am married. Twenty nine years. my decision. Did you stop and, I mean, are you married? I am married, 29 years. 29, and you have kids? I have two sons, 31 and 25. So did you call your wife and say, listen, I have to do this kind of crazy thing.

What do you think? Or you decided better not to tell her? No, that was one of those scenarios where you, you know, beg for forgiveness later and not say anything. I looked at it like this. I've had a good life. I've had a great career. I've done a lot of things. My kids are older. If something bad happened, my wife's going to be taken care of. And when I talked to my lieutenant at the time, who's now retired, he basically said, Dave, do we want to send the message that we can't do this? There's somewhere a bad guy can go and get away with something? And so he and his colleagues started planning and preparing for the dive.

But most of that planning went straight out the window as soon as he got underwater. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. There's actually three pits. The main pit that most people see, it looks just like a big, small lake of black tar. The consistency like pudding, it looks like to me. Tens of thousands of years ago, tectonic pressure started forcing oil up to the surface of the earth, and it pooled in these small lakes in what is now Los Angeles. And the reason there's something of a tourist attraction is because prehistoric animals

would wade in and get stuck. They couldn't escape and would eventually die, and their bones were perfectly preserved by the oil. They're still there today. There's a saber-toothed tiger that's thought to be 44,000 years old and a coyote that's 46,000 years old. It looks like something that you would walk into and just disappear forever. Yes. You see bubbles coming up.

That's the methane gas from coming through, and some are bigger and smaller, so you're always hearing popping noises. But it basically, yeah, it looks like once you step in, you're not coming back. In fact, they even have a couple of prehistoric dinosaur creatures, you know, that are fake ones that they have on the side. Some of them are halfway in the pit, depicting what happened in the past. On June 6, 2013, Dave and his team arrived at the tar pits very early in the morning. Dave wore a hazardous material suit.

The suit manufacturers said they thought it should hold up in the tar, but also that if too much time passed, the suit could dissolve and eventually burn itself up. So Dave took extra precautions. He put duct tape on all the seals. For his breathing, air was pumped down from the surface, and they'd set up a radio system so Dave could hear instructions from people on land. I asked him if he was nervous. I don't know about being nervous. My more thought was, I've got to pull this off. We're probably only going to get one shot at this,

and now everybody's there, the media and everywhere else, and I have all my peers there. I want to do the best job that we can, and I want to do it as safely as possible. And at the end of the day, I kind of wanted to be able to go back home. The first step was to bring in a fire truck to use the high-powered hoses to clear away the top layer of tar until the surface was something more, as Dave says, liquidy. Then they rigged safety lines in two different directions going across the pit and lowered a rowboat into the tar. And then Dave waded in.

As soon as I got in, as soon as my face passed through the first layer, went to the second layer and third layer, all you see is like a dull green, avocado covered hue. Some parts of the tar were like pudding where you could basically kind of pat it and feel it and you would be okay and other parts you touched and you immediately got stuck and it was like a cartoon commercial where your gloves would stretch like a foot until it would finally give away. The plan was that people on land would monitor the sonar. They would then guide Dave through his radio on where to look, or in this case, where to put out his hands and try to grab at something.

However, it was very difficult. You can't, like, swim normally very difficult. You can't like swim normally in tar. You can't really kick. So what we came up with is we had a 30 or 40 foot pole that the guys from the boat put in the tar. And once I submerged, I grabbed onto that pole and I would use that to pull myself down and to pull myself and then keep moving it forward a foot at a time into the directions that the radio man was giving me. We need you to move three feet to your right, two feet to your left, that kind of thing. Because my gauges and equipment, I couldn't see them. Nothing was working.

So you'd get to, they'd be radioing to you and saying, it's there, it's there, put your hand down. You'd put your hand down, you'd feel the object, whatever this evidence is, and you'd grab it and then you'd put it somewhere in a pocket or? Well, it's not, I wish it was as easy as that. Now you have a dry suit on, you have a glove on. Have you ever put on like two or three layers of gloves when it's real cold in the, in the winter time for the snow and you can't really grab very well? That's kind of the same situation. So you had to say, okay, that's not basically shape or size of what I'm looking for. This is basically shape or size of what I'm

looking for. And there was no way of putting it in an evidence bag or container. So what I basically did is once I found that item, I brought it up to the guys in the boat and they put it in an evidence container. I mean, you could have had your hand on like a million-year-old crocodile jaw. I could have. Yeah, there was some weird things down there. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. I could have. Yeah, there was some weird things down there. journalist Tristan Redman, as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

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and it came up to my face mask. And I started grabbing on the pole and pulling as hard as I could and let them know that I'm stuck and to start pulling with the ropes. And then my left leg got stuck and my fin got stuck. And I thought, well, I gave it a good shot. I can feel the pressure on my... And I thought, well, you know, I gave it a good shot. I can feel, like, you know, the pressure on my—I'm wearing a harness system, so I could literally feel it pulling on my chest and ribs. And finally, I got out.

He got unstuck and pulled himself to the surface to hand the recovered object to the men in the rowboat. He could have called it a day. But he knew that there was more evidence down there. The job wasn't done. And in spite of that close call, Dave went back down and immediately got stuck again. And that time, I don't even know how I didn't lose my fin. I felt it like coming off and I went to reach down with my hand and when my hand got stuck, the glove felt like it stretched about a foot to two feet. My fingers and everything, it finally snapped out. And I thought, okay, well, I'm not going to make it this time. Somebody is going to have to make that phone call. And I got out.

This is a good commercial for duct tape. Duct tape actually works. What was supposed to be a nine-minute dive ended up being 77 minutes. Because none of his dive equipment functioned, no one knows how deep Dave went, but the estimate is anywhere from 7 to 17 feet. What did it look like when you emerged? You must have been quite a sight. I was mostly full of tar.

My suit had to be trashed. The mask was full of tar. My gloves were full of tar, trashed. The fins, actually, whatever the material were, they were partly melted and deformed. And when we took off the gloves, my hands were full of tar. And then somehow my hood had to have moved because when they took off the mask, one side of my face and my ears and my neck were full of tar. He was nauseated and lightheaded, but after being checked up by the EMTs and monitored for a couple of hours, they gave him an all clear. So what did you say when you got home that night to your wife? I actually didn't get a chance to say anything. I don't like to come home and talk about my work because the different units I've been in,

I've been in a lot of specialized units, I've had some very bad experiences. I mean, some of the stuff you've seen on TV I've been involved in kind of thing. So I would just come home and normally I have my clothes in a plastic bag and say, here, take this to the cleaners and don't touch it because it's got, you know, biohazard on it or something. And just this day I was coming in, I walk in the door and my wife was standing there and she had a mean look in her face. And I said, hi, honey. And the first thing she did is punch me and she punched me hard. I mean, she she works out. So she hit me pretty hard. And then she burst out in tears,

and then she hugged me, and she said, you almost died, and you didn't even tell me. I'm like, well, what are you talking about? She said, it was all over the news. We were watching it at work. Yeah, I wasn't happy. Dave's wife, Leslie Mascarenas. I walked through the door, and I walked up to him him and I punched him in the chest, not hard. And then I hugged him and I said, don't ever do that again. And he said, okay. He just kind of, I think he was shocked because I've never hit him like that. I just, I was just so angry, but then just so happy that, you know, he was still standing there and he wasn't, you know, dead or, you know, in the hospital, seriously injured or something

with the methane gas. So I was kind of mad and happy at the same time and scared. You said that you didn't punch him hard, but he says that you did. And he said you punched him hard because you work out. Well, for a girl, I guess it was hard. But I do try to take care of myself. What is it like to live with someone who is actually doing a job and has this mentality and mindset of, you know, I care about my job. I love my job so much that, yeah, I'll risk my life. And that's funny because people ask me that all the time. Like, aren't you nervous or

don't you get nervous every time you go to work? And I said, no, he's one of those people that, you know, you just know he can take care of himself. You know, that's just who he is. And I knew that marrying him, so you just have to take it in stride. If I worried about it every day, I would probably have ulcers or something. The evidence Dave recovered in the tar pits did help the detectives bring suspects into custody. We checked in with him one more time last week to see if he could give us any update on the case. And he wrote in an email that the investigation is still open

and at least one individual is outstanding. He says his fellow officers have a nickname for him now, La Brea Dave. And while you'd think this would give him a free pass on the next weird job, it hasn't. Now people know what he can do. To be continued... You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where you can also find a link to the new Criminal 2016 calendar and a set of postcards with our favorite illustrations. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. Shows like The Illusionist, made by our pal Helen Zaltzman. In it, she explores the backstory behind language and the ins and outs of words we use every day. In her episode,

Tokipona, she teams up with fellow Radiotopian Nate DiMeo from the Memory Palace to learn a language in 30 hours. There's a language which is said to be the smallest language in the world. It has around 123 words, 14 letters of the alphabet, and apparently you can become fluent in it in around 30 hours of study. It's called Tokipona. Yan, that's right. Yan, lili, limeli. Sueli mute, sueli mute, sueli mute, many badgers.

Sueli meli lipona. Go listen. Sueli meli lipona. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. We'll be back in the new year with a whole new batch of stories. Thanks very much for listening this year, and for all your support. It means an awful lot.

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