A dive team looking for a man who disappeared two months ago found 25 vehicles in a mile-long stretch of Delta slough — and one of them contained the missing man’s body.
The discovery on Saturday, April 15, of Jacob VanZant’s SUV was announced by the community-funded search team Adventures With Purpose.
Vanzant, 24, went missing on the evening of Feb. 17 after picking up takeout from a Lodi restaurant. He was thought to have been headed toward his girlfriend’s home in Stockton — but the Adventures With Purpose team decided to focus on an area off that route because of the last pings received from VanZant’s phone, team leader Jared Leisek said in a video report.
On Friday, the first day of their search, divers spent several hours near the Eight Mile Road ferry landing, on Little Potato Slough between Empire Tract and Venice Island. In a stretch of slough a little more than a mile long, they discovered 25 vehicles in the water, Leisek said.
Returning on Saturday morning, they focused on the vehicles closest to the ferry dock, where Eight Mile Road ends abruptly at the edge of the deep channel. They quickly identified one of those as VanZant’s Honda Pilot. It was 18 feet underwater and 150 feet from shore, and the young man’s body was inside, Leisek said. The body and then the vehicle were recovered from the water.
Lodi police confirmed Monday that the SUV was VanZant’s, but said the body had not been positively identified.
The Adventures With Purpose video noted that the last stretch of Eight Mile Road before the levee is uphill, and a driver in the dark could easily have gone through the T-intersection and into the water.
The search team moved on this week to several operations in the Sacramento area, including a search for Duke Heringer, a Clarksburg wine grape grower who went missing in 2018.
Adventures With Purpose has logged more than 25 recoveries of missing persons, including the high-profile case of Truckee teen Kiely Rodni last summer.
