Diver Juan Heredia jumped into the Siletz River on Tuesday morning, his mind focused on 2-year-old Dane Paulsen’s sweet features and the clothing the boy’s mother last saw him wearing: jeans, blue shoes and a hoodie with bear-shaped ears.
The day before, Heredia, 52, had driven about 12 hours from his home in Stockton, California, to help with the exhaustive search for the toddler, who had gone missing March 1 while playing in the front yard of the family’s home along the river.
The search efforts ultimately zeroed in on the river after Lincoln County authorities concluded Dane had most likely been along its banks before he vanished.
Heredia, a mortgage lender, has a remarkable record of successful recovery efforts. Last year, he received a key to the city of Stockton for recovering the body of a local teen in the Calaveras River.
In all, he said he has helped find seven people who died in California waterways. Photographs of each hang in his living room, he said.
Last weekend, he was on vacation in Mexico with his wife when someone — a stranger — sent him a message via Facebook about the search underway in Siletz.
By Monday, Heredia was in his truck headed to Oregon.
Heredia started diving in Argentina, where he is from, in the mid-1990s. His first recovery was the Stockton teenager, whose story he saw when watching the news and hearing the mother’s plea to help find her son.
“The families are suffering so much every single day, every single hour,” he said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “That pain — I feel it. I think I have to do my best to reduce the pain. That’s what motivated me to go and … and give everything I have.”
Before entering the Siletz River this week, he spoke with Dane’s mother, Chamet Jackson, who provided a description of her son.
Heredia thought of those details as he began his solo effort.
“I like to feel connected to the person when I’m diving because in the end, I’m not searching for a body,” he said. “I’m searching for a son or daughter.”
The river was clear, the current brisk, the water a chilly 46 degrees, he said.
After about two hours in the water, he said he spotted Dane’s body. The boy was about 3 miles south of where he had likely entered the water. Heredia found the boy’s body against a submerged tree about 6 feet deep and about 8 feet from shore.
He notified Dane’s mother, then Lincoln County authorities.
Heredia said his wife had warned him about the trauma he would likely experience if his search proved successful.
“I’m going to have a baby in my arms if I find him,” he said to himself before the search began.
The experience of recovering a child so young deeply affected him, he said Wednesday while driving home.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s going to be very hard for me to manage the emotion of the situation.”
He plans to add a photograph of Dane to his living room wall.
He said he and Dane’s mother hugged and shared only a few words before he headed south. Nothing he could say would ease her anguish, he said.
A family friend said Jackson was preparing food for her gravely ill father when her son went missing. The family had moved to the property months ago from Lincoln City.
Jackson and her partner, Aaron Paulsen, run the Chowder Bowl in Depoe Bay. They have an older daughter.
Heredia said Dane wore just what his mother had recalled — down to his bear-eared hoodie.
“What a beautiful baby,” he said.
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