Gear recovered in teens' diving deaths

Divers visiting Monterey Bay on Sunday found the scuba gear belonging to two Carson City teens who died while diving there April 9.

Cameo Wood said she and her boyfriend, Maciej Stachowiak, and friend, Dan Arai, had just entered the water about noon in a cove called Hopkins Deep when they immediately spotted the gear lying on the ocean floor 80 feet below the surface.

The dive master with Wood swam near the gear for a closer look then the foursome surfaced to call the Coast Guard, said Wood.

"We didn't touch it," Wood said.

Among the items recovered were two buoyancy control device vests, two tanks, regulators and hoses, said Wood of San Francisco.

"They were sort of just sitting on the ground, tied together with yellow rope," she said Monday. "As soon as we went down, we saw the two sets of gear."

Stephen Anderson, 16, and Keegan Aiazzi, 17, failed to surface with their group of about 17 others April 9 while scuba diving near Cannery Row. The boys, best friends and members of the Carson High football team, were among a group of Carson High oceanography students on their first diving trip to the ocean.

After a search of more than an hour their bodies were recovered by divers from their chartered dive boat. Attempts to resuscitate them were unsuccessful.

Lead investigator, Monterey County Sheriff's Detective Kevin Gardepie, said Friday that without the dive gear it would be difficult to determine what went wrong for the novice divers.

Searchers had scoured the ocean floor since April 9 in the hunt for the tanks to no avail.

"The Coroner's Office will be conducting a forensic inspection of the recovered dive gear to eliminate equipment failure as a cause of the juveniles' death(s)," said Gardepie on Monday in a press release. "The investigation is ongoing and the results will be released upon completion."

Gardepie did not know how close to the location of the bodies the gear was found.

Wood said she's learned of Stephen and Keegan's deaths while looking for a boat to charter during her visit to Monterey over the weekend. She said she had read all the news reports and knew the gear was missing, but never imagined she and her group would find it.

"I couldn't believe that I had been following the story so closely and we found the gear," she said. "I knew it was a big deal to find it."

*edited to correct typo