The month-long mystery of the missing boater on Lake Oconee came to an end Sunday.
A specialized search and recovery team from Wisconsin found the body of Gary Jones.
When the Jones family met with the media Sunday alongside the searchers, organizations, law enforcement agencies, and volunteers, they were asked if they thought this moment would ever come.
“Of course,” replied Michael Jones, older brother of Gary. “We are a family of faith.”
Michael Jones described the moment as "bittersweet" when he got the final call that his brother had been found.
"There were a lot of rumors, a lot of stories going on, and we were just praying for closure," Michael Jones said. T"his has been probably one of the worst 29 days of our lives, and we depended heavily on our faith. Our heavenly Father brought us through, and he’s still sustaining us. We have come to a new level of faith, of strength, and we just encourage everyone to continue to pray for us.”
The beginning
Gary Jones and his fiancée, Joycelyn Nicole Wilson, both of Atlanta, had come to Lake Oconee Feb. 8 to celebrate Jones’s 50th birthday.
At the time, Wilson was a senior instructor in the Department of Mathematics at Spelman College, and Jones was a high school athletic coach at Westminster School in Atlanta.
Upon their arrival at Lake Oconee, the couple immediately launched their 11-foot Sun Dolphin boat at Fish Tale Marina around 3:30 p.m. Around 5:30 p.m., a call
"We hope it can be used as a catalyst for awareness, for safety, for resources to ... hopefully avoid something like this ever happening again." – Michael Jones, brother of Gary Jones, to 911, reported their boat was circling unoccupied in the waters near Jumping Rock.
The searches for both Jones and Wilson began immediately by DNR game wardens.
Local resident Jeff Everett discovered Wilson’s body floating near Long Shoals on Feb. 9. The search for Jones intensified with each passing day as more law enforcement agencies, search and rescue organizations, and volunteers got involved.
The day-long search efforts were scaled back on March 2.
Sills announced that DNR and his deputies would continue to search the shoreline once daily. Still, the intensified searches using sonar by law enforcement agencies and search organizations and organized searches with volunteers were suspended at that time.
The recovery
Some of the volunteers who had been out almost every day — Richard Pickering, of the nonprofit Emergency Dive Response Team near Atlanta, and Buck Buchanan and Wally Enres, of Dive911 in Florida — told the Jones family about Keith Cormican with the nonprofit Bruce’s Legacy in Wisconsin. The Jones family contacted Cormican and arranged with Sheriff Sills for him to come to Lake Oconee.
Bruce’s Legacy is named after Keith Cormican’s brother, Bruce, a firefighter who lost his life in a recovery operation for a drowned victim in Wisconsin. The organization’s primary mission is to provide closure to families who have lost a loved one in a water incident by locating the body so the family can move forward in their grieving process.
Cormican uses a Towfish sonar, which looks like a torpedo attached to a cable and is towed by the boat. The Towfish emits sonar pulses through the water and relays images to a computer screen.
Cormican, who also sells and provides training for the sonar equipment he uses, said he brought the latest Towfish sonar to Lake Oconee.
“I just got it this winter and hadn’t had it out yet,” he said. “I wasn’t going to bring it at first because of the trees. I didn’t want to have a chance of destroying it or losing it because it’s $85,000.”
Cormican said receiving all of the information from Pickering and Buchanan of the incident and previous weeks’ searches was the key to helping him know where to search for Jones.
He and his partner, Stuart, arrived Friday evening, and they began their search Saturday morning in “the deep water” areas, with no success.
Sunday, even though it was raining with thunder and lightning, they moved into the area where Wilson’s body was found.
“It’s an underwater forest there in an area that is marked by the buoys,” he described. “It’s the last area we wanted to cover because the chance of breaking something was very high, so we saved it for last.”
The many trees that once grew on the land alongside the banks of the Oconee River before it was dammed to form the lake made it impossible for Cormican to follow his typical search method with the Towfish deep in the water. Instead, he ran it just underneath the surface.
He said they had to turn off the boat motor a couple of times because they hit trees.
“It’s a treacherous area,” Cormican said. “A chance to find bodies in that kind of area is normally non-existent because you can’t use the sonar equipment in there.”
Finally, around noon, the image he was hoping for appeared on the screen: a figure about 45 feet deep lying on the lake bottom between two trees.
“I called Sills to let him know and found out that he was the one who was out in that boat across the water in the rain; I couldn’t believe it,” Cormican said of Sills. “I about fell out of my seat because that just doesn’t ever happen.”
Sills drove his boat to Cormican’s and examined the sonar image, which he described to The Messenger reporter as “clearly the shape of the body of a man.”
So, Cormican sent down his Remote-Operated Vehicle (ROV) robot to bring up Jones. The ROV has a video camera with a light, so they could see an actual video of what was happening. Sills said the footage was so clear that he recognized Jones’s shirt.
The ROV has an arm on it with a hand that Sills said resembles a handcuff. The robot took hold of Jones’ wrist and pulled him up to the surface.
Buchanan and Pickering helped Sills secure the victim in a mesh bag. They took him to the boat ramp, where Putnam County Coroner Hollis Harrison and Deputy Coroner Andre Williams waited.
Harrison officially pronounced Jones dead at 2 p.m. and took the victim to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation laboratory in Decatur for an autopsy.
Sills emphasized that an autopsy is routine in these circumstances.
On Monday, Sills said the preliminary results of the autopsy ruled that both Jones and Wilson died of “accidental drowning, but the medical examiner will not issue the official cause of death or sign the death certificate until [lab] results come back.”
The positive
“We hope for a positive to come out of all this,” Michael Jones said. “We hope it can be used as a catalyst for awareness, for safety, for resources to go to these great programs, and to hopefully avoid something like this ever happening again. Especially as it relates to the area where the incident occurred in terms of the safety markings and things of that nature.”
Final thoughts
At Sunday's press conference, Michael Jones, Sills, and Cormican each expressed appreciation to the many people involved in the search.
“DNR, they’re not here right now. I think they were soaking wet (from the rain) and went home to change, but they’ve been out there every single day that we’ve been out there,” Sills said. “And I’ve never seen them put out this tremendous of an effort before. Every day, they’ve had aircraft out there, boats, and a lot of personnel. And my deputies have been out every day … and Putnam County Fire Department has been out there almost every day.”
Sills also thanked Pickering, “who has been here since Day 1 and coordinated all these other people that have been here, all the many dog teams and people that have come from Florida and South Carolina and God knows where else, but I do not know.”
Cormican said when he comes into cases, he is an outsider, so he is dependent on those who have already been involved in the search.
“I’m really dependent on the local sheriff,” he said. “Some are very good to work with, and some are not. I just want to say that this sheriff you guys have in this county has been amazing. [He gave ]me open arms to come in and gave me anything that I needed.
“And all of Richard’s contacts that he had so we could keep our boat in the water longer and make this thing happen. And the community support has just been amazing. You’ve got a great community and a lot of support for the family and stuff to help us along. So, it’s not just about me. It’s all of us that pull together and work together to make this happen.”
Both Sills and Cormican also recognized the cadaver dog handlers, the local anglers who also searched with their sonars on their boats and the “good ol’ home people” who made lunches for all the searchers.
Sills ended with his gratitude for the Jones family.
“You know, in my business, sooner or later, everybody gets mad at me usually,” he said. “But this has been one of the most understanding families I’ve ever dealt with in a case like this, and I want to thank them.”
Michael Jones and his family felt the love of the community.
“We’ve had overwhelming support from folks who loved Gary,” Michael Jones said. “Gary was a game and life changer. He helped a lot of people, so that’s why so many folks have come in to support this. Gary has been a servant of God since his early years as a teenager, and he has done in only 50 years what probably other people have done in 85 or 90 years.
“So, we hope to carry his legacy on and hope to continue to support agencies and folks like these here. And we thank everyone for their support. Now, at this point, going forward, the family is asking for some privacy so we can celebrate Gary’s life.”