YouTuber went diving and ended up cracking open a 20-year-old …
A YouTuber committed to bringing closure to families managed to crack open a 20-year-old cold case when he went diving in Tennessee.
Jeremy Beau Sides is a dad, a scuba diver and a man who works to clean up the waterways, but he's best known for his YouTube[1] channel Exploring With Nug.
With more than 580,000 subscribers, Sides documents his time as an amateur investigator; a hobby which in 2021 took him to Sparta, Tennessee[2].
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In that same area just over 20 years ago, teenagers Erin Foster and her friend, Jeremy Bechtel, left Foster's home in her car[3] and were never seen again.
Determined to find out what happened, Sides armed himself with scuba, sonar and other exploratory equipment, and began to search the Calfkiller River.
Sources told Sides Foster would have frequently driven by the river, and after scanning it with sonar, he could see what appeared to be a car 13 feet below the surface of the water.
The next day, Sides dove into the river and found the car, recognising it as a Pontiac Grand Am - the same model driven by Foster on the night she went missing.
Sides found the car submerged in the water. Credit: YouTube/Exploring with Nug
Sides alerted the authorities[4], with White County Sheriff Steve Page telling News Channel 5: "Of course, I’m shocked. I’m like really? I didn’t believe it until I got there."
The sheriff called other officers to the scene, and they found Foster and Bechtel's remains inside the car.
There's a guardrail along the highway now, and over the years most dive teams believed the rail would have shown damage if the car had gone into the water.
However, it wasn't until 2021 that investigators realised the guardrail wasn't there in 2000. With the car almost completely intact, the scene indicated that the pair had simply run off the road.
“We all make mistakes," Page said afterwards. "The best we can do is learn from those mistakes and just keep moving forward."
The Sheriff said authorities had 'made mistakes'. Credit: YouTube/Exploring with Nug
In his video of the discovery, Sides shared footage of his dives into the river, as well as authorities pulling the car from the water.
Sides is one of a number of YouTubers who are dedicated to finding missing people, and after solving the case in Tennessee he explained: “There’s no red tape involved. We’re just doing what we do and we make the rules - and end of the day, we try to find these people who are missing. We focus on the waterways because that’s what our specialty is...
"We all have the same objective: Just keep looking and bring closure to these families.”