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Ryan Normoyle, a talented 29-year-old woodworker, had recorded the final cellphone images of himself happily jumping off a rented boat that he’d rented on Aug. 10 during a three-week West Coast vacation last month.
“It looks like he was playing around in the water didn’t know the boat was in gear,” South Lake Tahoe Police Lt. Travis Cabral said.
The Dumont native "wasn’t able to make it back to the boat,” which washed up in Glenbrook, Nevada, Cabral said.
Searchers used a Google location activation on Normoyle’s phone to locate him in Lake Tahoe’s deepest section, according to the nonprofit Bruce’s Legacy group, which conducts such search and recovery operations.
“Without this, there would have been no hope to know where to look,” the group, which helped in the search, said in a statement.
It was the deepest known human recovery in the United States and Canada, exceeding the previous record of 1,062 feet, according to the group.
The recovery took nearly three days and was assisted by, among others, several marine units and an unmanned submarine.
“[I]t takes many volunteers to do what we do,” Bruce’s Legacy said. “There is no way this recovery could have been pulled off without all the help and cooperation that we had here on Lake Tahoe this week. It takes special people to be able to do this work and we had many stepping up to get Ryan back home.”
A fundraiser helped pay for Normoyle's mother, brother and sister to go to Lake Tahoe.
It describes him as a “very loving and generous man with every step he took in life. He touched so many lives, and always had a smile on his face doing so."
GO TO: Search for Ryan (GoFundMe)
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