First, a blue Honda Civic was pulled from a retention pond near the highway in Miramar. A week later, in Plantation, a 1960s Chevy Impala was found with a children’s toy inside. The next day, a deteriorated 1999 Buick LeSabre was hauled from the depths of a nearby Plantation lake.
All of them had human remains inside.
Sunshine State Sonar, a team of volunteer divers known for solving missing persons cases across Florida, visited Broward County over the last few weeks to search for the remains of a missing mother and child, inadvertently locating two other cars owned by people missing from the area for years.
On Saturday, the team says they successfully found what they were looking for: the remains of Doris Wurst and her 3-year-old daughter, Caren, reported missing from Plantation in November 1974. But in the process, they uncovered cars linked to the missing persons cases of Bernie Novick, an 83-year-old World War II veteran, and Eduardo Graterol, 31, who never came home from a party at a friend’s house.
Volunteer dive teams like Sunshine State Sonar are not new to the area, though the sheer number of finds in a matter of weeks has made local headlines. Together, divers located hundreds of cars and at least six missing people in Florida over the course of 2023 alone.
“There’s like a thousand cars in water in Miami-Dade and Broward,” Mike Sullivan, one of the founders of Sunshine State Sonar, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Tuesday.
The blue Honda Civic
The first find came in late July: Sunshine State Sonar was looking for Wurst and her daughter, and assisting in a search for a missing Fort Lauderdale woman with Alzheimer’s disease, when they found a submerged vehicle in a retention pond along southbound Interstate 75 at the Miramar Parkway exit in Miramar on July 30.
The Florida Highway Patrol hasn’t confirmed it, but the company said the car was a blue 2011 Honda Civic that, when last seen, was being driven by Eduardo Paul Graterol, who was reported missing by the Pembroke Pines Police Department in 2018.
He had been missing since Oct. 21, 2018 from his home in Pembroke Pines. He was last seen at a party in Fort Lauderdale.
The body in the submerged vehicle has not been positively identified, the Florida Highway Patrol said in a news release. DNA results are pending, as is the cause of the crash that caused the car to end up underwater.
The 1999 Buick LeSabre
The second find came last weekend.
Bernie Novick was 83 years old when he left his wife of 55 years in their Plantation condo and never returned. On Monday, the same Plantation Police detective who had searched for him back in 2004 called Novick’s family, his son said: Novick’s silver 1999 Buick LeSabre had been found in a lake not too far away from where he lived.
“It was a very emotional situation,” Novick’s youngest son, Joey, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Tuesday.
Bernie Novick grew up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, his son said, before World War II broke out. He was drafted at age 20 and served in the artillery unit, stationed in North Africa, Italy and France. Later, he liked to joke to his family that he had the highest rank in the military and personally helped Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill win the war. As a kid, Joey Novick believed him.
Yet it was not war but the pain Bernie Novick felt towards the end of his life that became unmanageable, his son said. He had begun suffering from spinal degeneration and had to use a walker. Joey Novick recalled visiting Florida from his home in New Jersey to help his mother take care of his father, bringing him food and taking him to see doctors. In July 2004, shortly after Joey Novick returned to New Jersey, he got a call from his mother: his father had disappeared.
He flew back. For three weeks, they looked for any sign of Novick. Divers with the Plantation Fire Department searched nearby bodies of water. A few TV stations ran his picture, but nothing turned up. For the next 20 years, Joey Novick surmised that his father had died by suicide.
“At the time I thought what had happened was he decided that the pain was too much and decided to take his own life, possibly,” he said. “And I sort of moved on.”
Plantation Police wrote in a release that the man had “numerous health issues” and his wife said he suffered from depression.
Five years after Bernie Novick disappeared, the family was able to declare him legally dead. They gathered in Florida and sat Shiva for him, telling stories over a big meal at a local diner, the kind of thing Novick loved to do when he was alive.
“The only thing missing at that dinner was my dad,” Joey Novick recalled.
The ceremony brought his family as much closure as they could get. Joey Novick’s mother, who went on living alone in the Plantation condo, died in 2012, eight years after her husband disappeared.
Then, this past Saturday, divers with Sunshine State Sonar went to Plantation. But they weren’t looking for Novick. They were looking for Wurst and her 3-year-old daughter when they happened to locate another car in a nearby lake at 10151 SW First St. about an hour before.
“We knew it wasn’t gonna be Doris and Karen, so we left it behind,” said Sullivan, the co-founder of the diving team. “We had every intention of diving it, just not at that moment.”
They thought it might just be a stolen car. It was not. On Sunday, detectives with the Plantation Police Department met with Broward Sheriff’s Office divers, who pulled Novick’s 1999 Buick from the lake.
Even though family members were notified about the find, Detective Robert Rettig, a spokesperson for the police department, declined to provide a name because police still have to officially identify the remains using DNA or dental records.
“Within all likelihood this is going to be him,” Rettig said. “It’s his car and the remains are consistent. However, we aren’t going to verify that because we need to do our due diligence.”
In addition to missing people, Sunshine State Sonar divers have located a cement mixer in a lake in Deerfield Beach and a U-Haul truck in Lauderdale Lakes; with no people to identify, the stories behind them are even more of a mystery. Sullivan wonders if they’re kids sending them into the water for fun or associated with more serious crimes. His team has since left the area. But in about a month, they’ll be back to help dredge up more cars.
Just Tuesday afternoon, about 2:30 p.m., another car was found in a canal near 8400 W. Oakland Park Blvd. in Sunrise, police say. There was a body inside.
Sullivan said his team was not behind the discovery.
“At this time, the identity of the deceased, the vehicle description, and the cause of death are being investigated,” said Victor Fortune, a spokesperson for Sunrise Police. “More information will be provided as it becomes available.”
