In late May, Joanne Calasanz and her sister, Jomarie, waded into a shallow pool near the bank of the Kaweah River in Sequoia National Park. They laughed at how chilly the water was and dared each other to dip just a little more of their bodies into the cold, clear stream.
Then, without warning, Joanne felt a powerful current tugging her away from shore. Jomarie saw the fear in Joanne’s eyes and lunged to save her. In an instant, the current pulled them downstream toward a long stretch of punishing rapids.
Juan Heredia gets a hug from family members before searching the Kaweah River for any signs of Jomarie Calasanz of Los Angeles.
“You don’t know if you’re going up or going down, and you’re getting smacked by the rocks like a pinball,” Joanne recalled later.
After being starved for breath and battered so badly she was sure she was going to die, Joanne felt stones beneath her, planted her feet, and came to a sudden stop near shore.
Jomarie kept going.
Hours later, just before nightfall, searchers flying a drone spotted a body with long black hair, like Jomarie’s, beneath a thundering waterfall. With light fading and no hope that she was still alive, they decided it was too treacherous to attempt recovering her body in the dark.
But when they returned the next morning, Jomarie was gone.
Joanne and her parents spent three agonizing nights in a nearby hotel: in shock, grieving and desperate to hear Jomarie had been found. News filtered quickly through the tight-knit community that another drowning victim’s body had eluded rescuers.
On the family’s last morning at the hotel, a waitress who had kept her distance out of respect approached the grieving mother and gave her a hug and a tip: There’s a local legend, a man not affiliated with official emergency service agencies, who finds people.
Juan Heredia searches the Kaweah River for any signs of Jomarie Calasanz. Calasanz was swept away in the swift waters near Paradise Creek Bridge during a Memorial Day weekend outing with her family inside Sequoia National Park.
Juan Heredia, 53, a chiseled and tan scuba instructor from Stockton, is gaining a large following for a strange and sad specialty: In a little over a year, he has found the bodies of a dozen drowning victims after authorities had either given up or paused searches because they deemed conditions too dangerous.
Last summer, he found the body of 17-year-old Bree Scott, who drowned in the Kaweah after sliding into the swollen river not far from where the Calasanz sisters were swept away. Local officials searched for days with crews in rafts, helicopters and drones with no luck.
By comparison, Heredia’s approach was low-tech and risky: He squeezed into his old, thick wetsuit and pulled on a mask and snorkel. After saying a quick prayer, he swam the river alone, moving slowly from shore to shore. A few hours later, he found Bree’s slender body submerged beneath a tree about a mile and a half from where she’d slipped into the river.
“Bree was only under about a foot of water,” said Stacey Williams, a photographer for a local whitewater rafting company who has spent most of her life beside the Kaweah. “But you never would have seen her from a boat or the sky. The only way to see her would be in the water.”
Like many others, Williams was stunned, and moved, by the simplicity and bravery of Heredia’s approach.
Juan Heredia gets some rest from a nearby tree in between searching the Kaweah River.
Heredia, whose Facebook page has close to 80,000 followers, never imagined these acts of compassion would come to dominate his life. These days, he said, he gets calls from desperate families all over the world — Alaska, Canada, England — begging him to find their lost husbands, sisters, kids.
“I think when they call and tell me they have a loved one who has drowned, it opens up a wound in me, too. And then I need closure,” Heredia said. “I can’t stop thinking about them alone in that dark water.”
The demand has grown so intense that, this month, Heredia closed a construction business he ran to devote himself full time to a nonprofit he started with his wife, Angels Recovery Dive Team. He does not charge the families of the missing for his services and is supported by donations from his online followers.
Heredia’s love for the water began when he was a boy in Argentina, where in the northwest province of Tucumán, his dad took him fishing on lakes and rivers. Hooks were expensive, so whenever one fell off the line, young Juan would dive out of the boat and swim to the bottom to retrieve it.
He became a certified scuba diver in his late teens and an instructor a few years later.
Juan Heredia heads down for a deep dive as he searches the Kaweah River inside Sequoia National Park.
When Heredia was in his mid-20s, he heard people crying and yelling by the river near his home and rushed to see what was happening. A young man had drowned. The fire department took one look at the turbulent water and decided it was too dangerous to attempt a recovery.
Unimpressed, Heredia asked the firefighters if he could borrow a mask and fins. He found the man in about 10 minutes.
“His name was Segura. He was only 19. I’ve never forgotten him,” Heredia said.
Since then, Heredia has used his dive instructor’s certification to teach throughout the Americas: in Argentina, Mexico, Florida and, eventually, in Northern California, where he lives. But life moved on, responsibilities and bills piled up, and he turned to better-paying work in real estate and construction.
Then, in the spring of 2023, his 20-year-old stepson, Brian Ramirez, crashed his car into a canal outside Stockton. Trapped inside the vehicle, he drowned.
Did Ramirez’s death have anything to do with his passion to find other people’s lost children? Heredia, who spoke freely about almost any other topic, said, “No, not at all,” and changed the subject.
A year later, Heredia was watching local TV news when a story aired about a 15-year-old boy, Xavier Martinez, who went missing in the Calaveras River, near Heredia’s home. The police searched for days without success.
Unable to stop thinking about the missing boy and still not sure what he was going to do, Heredia drove to the riverbank to have a look. He found Xavier’s mom sitting there with a friend, “just waiting for her son.”
Heredia went home and spent the night gathering gear and carefully sketching out a search plan. When he returned in the morning, the mom was there again. Unsure where to start, he asked her where she thought her son might be. Without hesitation, she pointed to a patch of calm water in the shade of a big tree.
Thirty minutes after entering the water, Heredia found Xavier almost exactly where his mother had pointed. “It was unbelievable,” he said.
Instead of lying flat on the riverbed, as Heredia had imagined, Xavier was standing upright in 12 feet of water, his head upturned and arms stretched toward the surface. He had been wearing baggy pants and oversized tennis shoes that filled with water and held him down, Heredia said.
As he tied a rope around the boy, Heredia said, he felt like he was intruding in a private sanctuary. He told Xavier, over and over, “It’s OK, son, I’m going to take you home.”
Juan Heredia searches the Kaweah River for any signs of Jomarie Calasanz.
(Stacey Williams)
Since then, Heredia has found the bodies of 11 more drowning victims. While he is careful to recognize and praise local fire and sheriff’s departments in his social media posts, they rarely return the favor.
“I think it’s a little embarrassing, sometimes, if this random guy from Argentina finishes the job,” Heredia said with a chuckle.
Most recently, Heredia recovered the bodies of three men who drowned on June 18 after jumping into a pool beneath Rattlesnake Falls in Northern California. The Placer County Sheriff’s Office deployed a helicopter and divers, but they were stymied by strong currents and poor visibility, said spokesperson Elise Soviar.
The next day, with a storm coming in, the search was suspended.
Three days after the men disappeared, while the Sheriff’s Office was waiting for conditions to improve, Heredia, who had been contacted by a friend of one of the victims, hiked 7 miles to the waterfall.
Felicia Ung, center, plays with family members in the area on the Kaweah River where swift waters swept away Jomarie Calasanz on Memorial Day weekend near Paradise Creek Bridge inside Sequoia National Park.
After carefully watching how the currents swirled beneath the falls, he put on his gear and hopped in. Then, with a single deep breath, he dove and immediately spotted all three men about 50 feet beneath the surface.
“They were hanging together, head to head, like skydivers,” Heredia said.
With a few more deep breaths and powerful kicks of his fins, he pulled them out, one by one. He placed them gently behind some rocks so nobody would stumble upon them, then contacted the Sheriff’s Office as soon as he got a cellphone signal.
The next day, the department updated its Facebook post on the drownings, saying the bodies had been recovered, but did not mention Heredia.
Instead, days later, they sent deputies to Stockton to grill him on the details of the recovery, Heredia said. At the end of the meeting, they showed him a copy of a law that prohibits people from manipulating dead bodies without the consent of a coroner.
The Sheriff’s Office declined to discuss the deputies’ motivation, but Heredia thought they were warning him to back off.
It’s easy to see why public safety agencies would be wary of the publicity Heredia is attracting. The last thing they want is every untrained wannabe influencer with a YouTube channel and thirst for glory jumping into raging rivers and freezing lakes. It would only be a matter of time before agencies had to rescue the influencers — or recover their bodies.
But one California emergency official, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the record, said their dive team members actually admire Heredia, and they’re a little jealous of his freedom to act so spontaneously.
Police and firefighters have thick stacks of rules and protocols to follow and endless cautionary advice from oversight committees, insurance companies and lawyers telling them not to put personnel at unnecessary risk.
“But at the end of the day, it’s about bringing closure to families, and he’s certainly doing that,” the official said.
Juan Heredia searches the Kaweah River for Jomarie Calasanz of Los Angeles.
In early June, Heredia traveled to the Kaweah to search for Jomarie Calasanz, but the water was still so rough he smashed his ankle into a rock and had to call off the search.
When he returned for a second try in mid-July, the river was relatively tame, and the swelling in Heredia’s ankle had decreased.
But it was brutally hot. By 9 a.m., the temperature had already topped 80 degrees. As he shoved his limbs into his rubber wetsuit — at 7 millimeters, it was more than twice as thick as what most Southern California surfers wear in the summer — sweat was already beading on his forehead.
Asked why he doesn’t wear a lighter, cooler suit, he replied with one word: padding. Even with the water level low, he would still need to navigate boulder-strewn rapids. And when he was out of the water, the thick rubber would help guard against thorns and sharp tree branches.
Before he left a campground parking lot and headed to the river, Joanne Calasanz and her parents arrived from their home in La Puente to thank him and hold vigil while he searched. He told them he planned to cover 5 miles, starting in the pool beneath the waterfall where Jomarie was last seen.
As the hours ticked by with no word, Francis Calasanz, 71, Jomarie’s father, leaned against the family Subaru and scrolled nervously through his phone. An engineer by training, he was burying himself in technical details of “the incident,” as he called it.
A moment of prayer as Juan Heredia, center, prepares to search the Kaweah River.
At first, he spoke so softly it was almost impossible to hear him over the babbling river. But he explained that his research using a website popular with kayakers and whitewater rafters had shown that the volume of water in the Kaweah — its middle fork, to be precise — was at its annual peak when his daughters waded in the Sunday before Memorial Day.
Then he called up photos of his daughters minutes before they were swept away. One showed Jomarie, 26, in a black bikini with her arm around her mom. Both of them are smiling and flashing peace signs. In the background of other photos, the clear, green river looks perfectly flat and perfectly harmless.
They were day-trippers from the Los Angeles suburbs, Francis said, and had no idea that a river so placid on the surface could be moving with lethal force underneath, charged with snowmelt from distant mountains.
A sign warns the public of the potential dangers in the Kaweah River.
It was “deceivingly calm,” he said several times, his soft voice shaking.
Around 2 p.m., Heredia arrived at the campground for lunch, looking exhausted. By now the temperature had climbed past 100 degrees.
To get from the river bottom to the road turnout where his wife, Mercedes, and Williams had been keeping an eye on him with binoculars and a telephoto camera lens, Heredia had to climb about 500 vertical feet with no trail and no shade.
Asked if he was going to quit for the day, he seemed shocked that there could be any question. “I’m going to eat and keep going,” he said. “I gotta keep pushing.”
About four hours later, as the sun ducked behind nearby mountain ridges and the light began to fade, he arrived back at the campsite and peeled off the stifling wetsuit.
“You go and look everywhere and she’s not there,” he said in disbelief. “The rocks form a V, and you think she has to be there, but she’s not there. Go into a cave? She’s not there. Between the trees? She’s not there.”
But he didn’t quit. He went back the next day and spent another eight hours searching in the punishing heat, again with no luck. In a Facebook post that evening, he promised not to give up.
