ORLANDO, Fla. – Orlando police have confirmed a vehicle belonging to a missing mother has been found, nearly 12 years later.
Divers discovered the red van in a retention pond near Interstate 4 and World Drive over the weekend. They also found remains they believe are Sandra Lemire’s, but detectives are waiting for a positive identification.
Monday, News 6 showcased the Sunshine State Sonar team, who made the discovery, and the impact it had on Lemire’s family. What we learned is how much else is out there, and what other cases the organization has helped solve.
Mike Sullivan started Sunshine State Sonar with a mission to use sonar technology to aid in missing-person case research. He and a team of volunteers spend countless hours, free of charge, to search, dive, and recover.
“Believe it or not, every one of us we’re parents — mothers, and fathers. We have full-time jobs,” Sullivan said. “We just do this; I would say on average once a month.”
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Sullivan said he saw a YouTube video from “Adventures with Purpose,” an Oregon-based search team, and was inspired to start his own searches in Florida.
“I said, ‘Boy, there is such a need for this in Florida. There is so much water in Florida,’” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said he had used SONAR before for fishing, but when live scanning technology was introduced in 2019 it provided the capability to see more detailed images underwater in real-time.
Once he decided to start Sunshine State Sonar, the caseload quickly developed as they made discoveries.
“Just in Miami-Dade and Broward County alone we have 37 cases that we’re working on,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said his team typically focuses on missing person cases with vehicles that were never found. They found Sandra Lemire’s van after searching more than 60 bodies of water since July 2022.
Sullivan said detectives recently provided the location of the last tower her cell phone pinged off and that led to a new search area. A volunteer on the Sunshine Sonar Team helped map the area, extensively researching the landscape and the bodies of water that were present in 2012 to determine which ones to search first.
Sullivan said the team has helped solve six cases so far, and they have also found another set of remains in Davie, Florida that have yet to be identified.
In August 2023, Sunshine State Sonar started working to find an elderly man with dementia who disappeared in Miami near the Florida turnpike. While they were searching bodies of water around the highway to look for him they came across 1987 Pontiac Lemans in a retention pond. Law enforcement agencies later told them the case was from 1992 out of Hialeah.
“We contacted Miami Dade Police right away. We give them the license plate on the vehicle, and when we did that police said it’s not coming back in the system because it’s so old,” Sullivan said. “Twenty minutes later they call us back and say, ‘We found it.’ They had to dig in filing cabinets to find this because it was before the internet — before they uploaded all these cold cases to the internet.”
Sullivan said Sunshine State Sonar also found Robert Heikka, a missing schoolteacher from Port Orange.
In April 2023, they found his car in a canal. He had been missing for three years.
“We had been working seven on that case. We had a good relationship with the Port Orange Police Department, the detectives who were working on that case, and they sought us out and asked for our assistance.”
Heikka had taught at Creekside Middle School for more than thirty years. The principal at the school knew something was wrong when he did not show up to school one day.
“The FBI had got involved and they were able to track his cell phone to a pretty tight vicinity, but there’s so much water in that area. With the flood plain everything on the side of the road is underwater, so it took a while to find him,” Sullivan said. “Everybody knew this guy. If you lived in Port Orange, you had Mr. Heikka for a teacher.”
Five days after they found Heikka, they also found Robert Helphrey. A father of two and military veteran who had been missing for seventeen years.
“When we find something, we’re changing these people’s lives,” Sullivan said. “To give them that information, you know, what they need that lets them move forward with their grieving process. We always say we never provide closure for these people, it’s answers. Answers that allow them to move forward.”
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