The body of a man who drowned in Lake Lanier was recovered today after nearly three months since his disappearance.
A South Carolina man, Dorian Adonis Pinson, age 24, was swimming with his friends in the area of Sunrise Cove Marina on April 18 when he couldn’t make it back to the boat. One of his friends had to be rescued due to high winds.
Despite multiple searches from the rescue teams, they were unable to recover his body.
Less than 24 hours after his family publicly announced they were hiring a private dive team, the DNR confirmed that his body had been found.
The announcement gave credit to multiple agencies for his recovery. According to a press release, the operation was a cooperative effort of the DNR, Hall County Sheriff’s Office deputies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Bruce’s Legacy Search and Recovery, a non-profit Wisconsin company that specializes in locating and recovering in hard-to-find drowning victims across the nation.
At around 11:20 a.m. on Wednesday, Pinson was found by DNR game wardens with a sector scan sonar in 117 feet of water. Then, over an hour later, a team from Bruce’s Legacy was able to recover the body with a Remote-Operated Vehicle (ROV), along with assistance from local deputies and the Corps of Engineers.
The teams that originally searched for him had difficulty in the water, which is 130 feet deep with standing timber covering the bottom. During the initial 5-day search, the game wardens covered over 300 acres of the lake using a grid search pattern. On the sixth day after the incident, they transitioned to surface searches and shore sweeps.
Pinson’s body was sent to the GBI Crime Lab. The incident is still under investigation by the DNR Law Enforcement Critical Incident Reconstruction Team (CIRT). That is all the information that can be released until the completion of the investigation.
