Sandra Lemire vanished after leaving a date in 2012 in her minivan.
A 12-year-old cold case was closed after a group of volunteer divers found a missing woman's vehicle and remains in a pond near Disney World.
Sandra Lemire, a single mother of three, was out on her first date at a Denny’s in 2012, with a man she met online. She vanished that night after leaving the restaurant in her minivan.
Lemire’s disappearance went unsolved for over a decade.
The volunteer drivers, known as the Sunshine State Sonar, found the minivan submerged in a pond not far from Disney World, adding to their growing list of cold cases they helped crack.
After the find from the divers, officials pulled Lemire's car from the pond and police found what is believed to be the single mother’s remains inside.
“I actually literally dropped down to my knees where I was and started crying. Cause it's really hard to take in, especially after all these years and then finally getting closure,” one of Lemire’s sons tells Inside Edition.
The searchers have a long history of successful revolutions to missing person cases. Last year, the divers helped find the car of a Florida school teacher who had been missing for two years and found the remains of a father who had been missing for 17 years in a pond outside Tampa.
The diver who found Lemire’s car, Mike Sullivan, tells Inside Edition, “We're just so happy we can help this family out, it means everything to us.”
Sullivan said that once they found the car, he FaceTimed Lemire’s son to give closure to the family.
“We took the boat, we went right over Sandra’s vehicle, and I took my phone and I turned it around and I showed him, I said, ‘Right now we are right above your mother, she is fourteen feet below us.’ It was a pretty emotional moment.”
A GoFundMe page has been set up to raise money for Lemire's funeral costs.
Following her disappearance, Lemire’s date was looked at as a possible suspect but police cleared him after surveillance footage showed that he had stayed at the Denny’s long after Lemire left.
