On the morning of July 27, Dexter Sain and Curtis Herron set sail on their new boat over the waters of Lake Michigan, probably to give it a test run, their loved ones believe, as the longtime friends from Chicago had little to no boating experience.
But when Sain neglected to call his daughter on her birthday that day, his family knew something was wrong.
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“We were expecting him to give her a call and he never did and that’s something he would’ve never done,” Terrica Sain, Dexter’s sister, said.
Sain and Herron, both 36, have been missing since they disembarked from East Chicago Marina in Indiana, where they were last seen by a friend on July 27, according to East Chicago police and the boaters’ families. The pair’s 30-foot Bayliner named Cindy Ann was seen departing from Pier C at about 8:28 a.m. and headed toward Illinois, before moving beyond the view of surveillance cameras.
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But not long after, their journey seemed to run into trouble. At 10:15 a.m. on July 27, police say that Sain and Herron called a tow company after experiencing electrical issues, though they ultimately declined a tow because it was too expensive.
The last recorded location for the two men was one mile from Cleveland-Cliffs Steel.
David Lenardson, who works at Great Lakes Marine Services LLC, told the Tribune on Thursday that the missing boaters had contacted the company that morning to inquire about a tow, but that one of the boaters turned down their services. He said they gave the boaters contact information for the Lake County Sheriff marine unit but the unit never received a call from the boaters.
Lenardson said it’s unclear how much the tow would have been because the company receives hundreds of service calls, but said the company charges $300 to $400 an hour and that the tow was estimated to take a couple of hours.
According to Sain’s family, the boaters called Sain’s brother on the afternoon of July 26 after the boat was first placed in the water and mentioned that there were issues with its battery.
“I still have questions,” said Curtis Herron’s younger sister, Tatiana. “What do you all do when someone is stuck out there and don’t have no money or anything to get the help they need? You just leave them out there?”
Multiple agencies have been deployed and brought into the search since the boaters disappeared, including the Coast Guard, Department of Natural Resources, FBI, Chicago Police Department marine unit and the Lake County Sheriff Department marine unit.
But two weeks of little to no progress has left a void filled with pain and frustration at how the search has been handled.
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“My family is falling apart. We’ve never experienced anything like this. This is unimaginable. This is something you think you only see on TV,” Terrica Sain said.
The Lake County marine unit said it began searching for the boaters on July 29 after being notified they were missing. The Coast Guard was notified by the county sheriff on the morning of July 30 and began its own search and rescue efforts which were suspended Aug. 1 after two days.
Tatiana Herron said that she has had a difficult time getting in contact with the officials working on the search since her brother and Sain were reported missing. She added that she didn’t learn of the call for a private tow until reading a news article related to the search.
Both sisters say they had trouble filing missing person’s reports for their brothers for several days because neither of them live in Indiana and had to track other people down to file the reports. Herron said that she last spoke to her brother the weekend before he went missing, adding that he had not mentioned the upcoming boat trip to her.
Herron also shared that her brother uses a wheelchair, as he was a gunshot victim four years ago.
Additionally, Herron said she never received an explanation for why the Coast Guard suspended its search Aug. 1, a decision that Sain also took issue with.
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“We’re very dissatisfied,” Sain said. “These are two Black men that are lost out on the water. I honestly feel like if they were white men they would’ve done more. I hate to say that, but I feel that way. … After only looking for them for two days, they discontinued the search.”
According to Jerome Popiel, incident management and preparedness adviser at the Ninth Coast Guard District, it is common for searches in Lake Michigan to end after just one day after exhausting all resources and potential search avenues. He noted the various considerations made by Coast Guard officials when making the “judgment call” to suspend a search, including measuring the survivability of someone who might be in the water.
“Where (searches) go longer is when the water is really warm and you have a really big search area. … Sometimes those go longer, like cases in the Gulf of Mexico or off of Miami, Florida. … Up here with cooler water and southern Lake Michigan, which is confined by the states’ boundaries, (searches) typically don’t go that long,” he said.
Other agencies plan to continue their search under the direction of East Chicago Police Department criminal investigation division, which is working it as a missing person’s case.
Sain said she feels confident that regardless of where her brother and Herron are or what has transpired over the past two weeks, that they have taken care of one another.
“I know that wherever they are Dexter is taking care of Curtis and he’s making sure that he’s OK as well. And if something did happen — God forbid something did happen — my brother would have risked his own life to save Curtis’ because he knows that Curtis wouldn’t have been able to do anything for himself because the fact that he was, you know, in a wheelchair,” she said. “My brother would have risked his own life to save Curtis.”
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If anyone has information regarding the whereabouts of Herron and Sains, they can call East Chicago Police Detective Miguel Pena at 219-391-8318 or the department’s anonymous tip line at 219-391-8500.
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Chicago Tribune’s Shanzeh Ahmad contributed.
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