Murky Waters
AT A QUARTER to 6 on Tuesday evening, a junkman named Joseph Dwyer happened upon the four bicycles. "When I saw the first bike," he said at the time, "I thought I would take it home to my son. Then I saw three others. Then I walked a little farther and saw the piles of clothes, and I got a sick feeling."
Dwyer contacted a lieutenant he knew at the 12th precinct, and soon the police were on the scene. They took one look and called the police department’s Marine Rescue and Recovery Unit. Even before the divers had completed their work, the police had articulated a version of things that they later amended, feeding the families’ accusations of negligence. Both O’Connor and Lt. Paul Domenic originally told reporters (who were on the story within hours) that the clothes were stacked in individual piles with the shoes neatly lined up in a row. "As if they were taken off and laid side by side," Domenic said at the time. Later, the story changed. Now the official position is that the arrangement of clothes was hap-hazard. ”’Neatly lined up’ wasn’t exactly what we meant," O’Connor says now. "Just that there were different piles of belongings for each boy."
It wasn’t long before word blew up from the Schuylkill into the neighborhood like a bad wind. Bikes. Bikes. The Ruffins, Fords, Ellisons and Johnsons gathered their own and rushed to the river. Though the light had almost vanished when the marine unit arrived, the divers took their time. It was clear that if the boys were in the water, they would already have been there too long to rescue. The men settled into their more deliberate "recovery" mode and spent 20 minutes preparing.
At a quarter past 9, diver Jack Walder donned a 50-pound weight belt and lowered himself into the water, then swam to the rock, where he took on 90 more pounds of tanks and head equipment. No one knew about the dredging or the nature of the rock-its rounded lip and dropoff. Walder began a slow descent, reached with his foot for what felt like a stepping-down point-but wasn’t-and fell. His "tender" -the spotter handling the line that served as Walder’s safety and communications link-heard him yelling "Falling! Falling! My ears!" Walder, a four-year veteran of the marine unir, had never encountered anything like it. He clawed with his hands and feet at the retaining wall as he sped downward in the dark, but its face was slicked with a thick sedimentary coat formed by decades of leaking oil. As the tender fumbled with the line, his headset filled with a horrible wheezing sound as Walder hurried the air from his throat to relieve the mounting pressure on his inner ear. "Ear problem!" said the voice 50 feet beneath the surface. Slowly, the tender pulled him up. Walder’s injury prevented him from diving for a week.
By 10:05, when the divers had regrouped, the chill coming off the water prompted them to tire up the space heaters in the galley. And when Dave Gallus entered the water, he wore a full-body thermal insulator and two of long underwear beneath his dry suit. Still, the water was so cold-in the mid 50s within minutes he began to lose feeling in his extremities.
Gallus had Mike Gelovich, his tender, lower him slowly, without slack, down the face of the retaining wall. He didn’t bother taking a headlamp. The so-called black water of the Schuylkill, aswim with soot, refracts light. The more powerful the light, in fact, the more it diffuses; beams won’t penetrate tore than three inches into the murk. At a depth of two feet there was nothing to see. When Gallus reached the velvety black the bottom, he eased himself, stomach first, onto the floor of the river. Then, spreading his arms and legs, he began to search by feel, undulating as if making a snow angel. On a hunch that the boys could have slid straight down the retaining wall like his friend Jack Walder, Gallus started his crawl at the edge of the bulkhead. Unlike much of the Schuylkill, where the bottom is a thick, undefined cloud of silt, the dredged bottom was hard-packed and icy-slick. There was debris-trees, cables, chunks of metal Soon after he started, something big swam by, flapping him on the head. Saltwater predators-crabs, sturgeons, sharks-sometimes wander miles upstream in the Schuylkill’s rackish waters. If the children were here, Gallus wondered, had the marine life yet begun on them?
