By Anna Skinner
At 9:23 a.m. Sept. 4, rescue divers located the body of drowning victim 24-year-old Andrew Dimitroff. Dimitroff of Indianapolis was swimming with a group of friends in Cocktail Cove on Geist Reservoir on Sept. 3, and after 15 minutes of being submerged, his friends realized he was missing, according to local police.
Divers began a rescue search, but after nearing two hours without finding him, they switched to recovery mode.
“A group of friends were out enjoying the weekend on the water, they had a raft with a hole in the middle of it, they would jump down through the middle of that and then come back up,” Fishers Fire Dept. Public Information Officer Capt. John Mehling said. “Unfortunately, the victim didn’t come back up and wasn’t noticed right away. It was a very unfortunate situation for everyone involved. It was heartbreaking we couldn’t locate him that night.”
The next day, divers expanded their search and located Dimitroff’s body. The search was a culmination of efforts from the Indiana Dept. of Natural Resources Law District 4, Indianapolis Fire Dept. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Dept., Fishers Fire Dept., Fishers Police Dept. and Geist Patrol.
A toxicology report was not available as of press time.
“Problems in these situations are identifying exactly where the victim might be,” Mehling said. “With them not realizing right away something had happened, it created a bigger window of uncertainty, so identifying exactly where the victim might be located and where we believed him to be, we searched that extensively and didn’t have any results. The following morning we expanded out and were able to locate him fairly rapidly.”
