NEED TO KNOW

• Last year, Juan Heredia decided to help a local mom in California whose son had vanished into a river. Then he learned how many other people need his help

• Since then, Heredia, a father and volunteer diver, has recovered 15 missing bodies

• Loved ones of those he’s helped praise his “combination of courage, devotion and faith”

In March 2024 Juan Heredia saw another parent’s plea for help with their teenage son and couldn’t get it out of his head. 

Fifteen-year-old Xavier Martinez had made a fatal mistake when he jumped into the Calaveras River next to his high school in Stockton, Calif., and never came back out. 

Official rescue teams scoured the water for six days to no avail. His mother, Amanda Martinez, began appearing on the local news, and Heredia and his daughter Camila, who’d gone to school in the same district as Xavier, decided to go out to the site of Xavier’s disappearance and ran into Amanda.

A former general contractor and house-flipper by day, Heredia, 53, is also a certified diver and scuba instructor who grew up navigating the murky river water of his native Argentina. (As a boy, he was quick to jump in after lost fishing hooks since replacements proved costly.) 

When he met with Xavier’s mom last year, she said she felt Xavier was lying underwater in the shade of a tree. 

Almost as soon as Heredia went in, that’s where he found the boy — head tilted toward the sun, hands held as though in silent prayer. 

“He was like an angel,” Heredia says. “Something I never expected to see.”

Martinez was overwhelmed at Heredia’s feat: “It was just so mind blowing,” the 39-year-old tells PEOPLE. “How are you able to find somebody in 30 minutes when it’s been six days?” 

The Stockton City Council officially designated Heredia a hero and gifted him a key to the city. Soon other people began calling for help with their missing loved ones. 

“I felt the need of the community,” he says. So he got to work. 

Less than two years later Heredia has found the bodies of 15 people — babies, brothers, friends, parents and their children — at 10 sites across California and Oregon. 

Most recently, he retrieved a 7-year-old drowning victim how had gone missing after, authorities said, she and her father were swept away into the ocean at Big Sur, Calif.

The family, including her surviving mother and sibling, 2, were visiting from Canada.

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It’s “bittersweet” work, Heredia says: “The night after is when it’s hard for me to sleep, when it’s hard for me to think about it. That’s the worst part.” 

In the water, however, all of that falls away. “In that moment,” he says, “I have one mission, one purpose, and that is finding the son or that daughter.”

In July Heredia stepped away from construction and real estate work to focus on his nonprofit Angels Recovery Dive Team, which he created to help support his volunteer work. He’s aided by wife Mercedes and his children from a previous marriage, Camila, 22 and 24-year-old Matias, all of whom are divers as well.

He does not charge for his services, relying instead on donations. 

“I remember every single name and every single place of every single son and daughter I’ve found,” he says.

Matt Bowman calls Heredia a “balm in an otherwise terrible moment.” 

Like the Martinez family, he was feeling desperate when the diver entered his life in June: Three of Bowman’s friends — Matt Anthony, Matt Schoenecker and Val Creus — vanished into Rattlesnake Falls, one by one, the second and third man trying to save the first. 

The isolated terrain and strong currents made search and rescue near impossible, it seemed.
Bowman says nine other professional divers had assessed the water and concluded it was too dangerous to reach the bottom.

But not for Heredia, who trekked through rain and hail on an injured ankle to reach the falls, diving for more than three minutes at a time without an oxygen tank. 

Heredia told Bowman that when he found the three friends, they were still together. Despite the turbulence near the surface, even the shirt Matt Anthony was wearing wasn’t moving.

“His combination of courage, devotion and faith made it possible,” Bowman says of Heredia. “He thinks with a mother’s heart, and if there is to be a funeral, he aims for an open casket to give some peace.”

Indeed, when Heredia dives, he never uses the word “bodies,” Bowman says. “He refers to the victims by their first names.”

Heredia’s blended family — wife Mercedes, a 52-year-old mortgage loan officer, has three kids in addition to his two — has also faced tragedy: Mercedes’ son Brian, 20, was killed in 2023 in a car accident that plunged him into a canal where he drowned. 

Heredia says he’s often asked what case impacted him the most. Until recently he would have said it was the recovery of the young, like finding 2-year-old Dane Paulsen in Oregon and holding his cold body until the coroner arrived.

In August Heredia was called to help find Whisper Owen and her daughter, 8-month-old Sandra, who are thought to have crashed in the same area where his stepson Brian died.

“It was the same place where [Brian’s] car went down,” Heredia says. 

As Mercedes knelt by her son’s riverside memorial, rescuers with Heredia pulled Owen’s vehicle from the depths, with the mom and daughter still inside. 

“Everybody stopped and nobody talked. It was like the world stopped,” he says, seeing it as a moment that brought clarity to his work ending heartbreaking mysteries and showing others that they aren’t alone in their despair. 

“Every time I recover somebody,” he says, “they become part of my family.”

Read the original article on People