DECATUR — An FBI dive team was searching Lake Decatur Monday in a bid to help recover evidence related to two separate homicides, according to Decatur Chief of Police Shane Brandel.

The divers have been working in the area southeast of Reas Bridge Road, near the intersection of Reas Bridge Road and Sangamon Road.

Police have urged boaters to stay clear of the area “for the safety of the divers.”

Brandel said there are two distinct search areas the cops want the divers to concentrate on. He said the divers were already scheduled to be here to hunt for discarded evidence in a murder case dating back some six months and then the same need for a lake evidence search also arose in another “fairly recent homicide,” Brandel explained.

“So it just happened they were going to be here anyway and when we had reason to believe there could have been evidence that could have been discarded in the lake on this recent homicide as well, we added that to the list of things that they were going to help us out with,” the chief added.

Brandel would not describe the evidence being sought, only to say it was “fairly small objects” and confirmed the FBI divers were not looking for bodies. The police had issued a news statement Monday morning as the divers started their search and Brandel said he wanted to make sure nobody got the wrong impression about what was happening.

“When people see FBI dive teams out there the rumor mill starts and so if we don’t put something out about it, it just gets crazy,” he said. “No, we’re not looking for a body, but I won’t say what evidence we are looking for.”

Brandel said he didn’t want to identify the homicide cases involved, either, worried that too much publicity might cause problems later on with legal proceedings. “We don’t somehow want to tarnish the integrity of the investigations,” he added.

“And if we start talking about it beforehand, then that could maybe steer what witnesses might tell us and things like that. So we just want to keep certain information close for the time being but at the right time we will be more than happy to say what case the searches were related to and what we were looking for.”

The Decatur Fire Department has a dive team trained in evidence recovery and Brandel says they do a great job and his department has used them on other cases. But he said he wanted the FBI involved in these instances because their divers are trained to search intensely for small items of evidence.

Asked how long the divers will continue working, Brandel said it depends how long it takes them to exhaust their search areas or how quick they find what they are looking for. “And I have not been informed they have found what they are looking for yet,” he said, speaking Monday afternoon.

A check of Herald & Review archives shows this is not the first time FBI divers have been called in to assist the city police. They plunged into the lake’s murky waters following the 2017 murder of Windsor man Zachary Hubbartt, 22, who had been lured to Decatur for a drug deal and then murdered in an abandoned house.

Police said accomplices of convicted killer Jason A. White had dumped evidence connected to the killing in the lake which the divers were sent in to recover.

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