WACO, Texas — The case of a Waco missing mom has been reopened a little more than four years later after a private dive team found her car in the Brazos River with an unidentified body inside.
Adventures With Purpose is a group of divers who travel around the country conducting underwater search efforts for missing people.
"Our specialty is underwater sonar search and recovery and so if a person is missing with a vehicle, our niche is to look for them underwater in a river or lake," said the founder of Adventures With Purpose, Jared Leisek.
They heard about the case of missing mom 43-year-old Stephanie Torres and took interest.
The Torres family told 6 News back in 2017 that Torres left her home without her cell phone, wallet and medication. Her daughter, Bianca, said Torres seemed depressed, suicidal and always in pain due to her Fibromyalgia.
"Basically she got tired of being in pain all the time. Maybe that's why she left. Maybe she doesn't want to be here anymore,” her daughter said at the time.
"When she went missing in December of 2017, the information that we were given was that she was possibly suicidal," said Cierra Shipley, a spokeswoman for Waco Police Department. "She may have been intoxicated at the time. There was little other information that came in, but those leads turned up empty."
Shipley says the department suspended the case in 2019 when there was no new evidence. The case wasn't closed though, she said the department continues to visit suspended cases from time to time.
With no movement on the case, it was time for Adventures With Purpose to step in.
The group has worked several cold cases and they hear about a lot of cases around the country from their subscribers. Leisek says he heard about Torres' case, reached out to her daughter and got to work.
"We started over at Brazos East Park," he said. "We started at the west boat ramp, made the most logical sense and by the time -- we didn't even make it out of the park -- by time we made it down to the east boat ramp, that's where we located three vehicles."
The info they were given from family put them in the right place. Waco Police confirmed the one vehicle pulled from the bottom of Brazos East Park boat ramp did belong to the missing Waco mom.
All these years though the river was never searched by Waco Police.
"It wasn't in our mindset to check the river because no one had told us that she might be there or maybe that's where she was last seen or anything like that," Shipley said.
Shipley says they found a three-inch bone and an unidentified body in the back seat of the car.
"We're not sure how this vehicle got there and that's what we're going to look into and try and determine," she explained. "Hopefully, those autopsy reports will help clear up some information that we're missing."
Waco police are now waiting on the autopsy results, which could take up to three months.
Shipley says they also say they plan to pull the other two vehicles that Adventures With Purpose saw from the river soon. She told 6 News one of the vehicles is a truck but they don't know anything else about it.
The Adventures With Purpose team told 6 News they turned in underwater footage from their find in hopes it will help Waco Police with their investigation.
You can see other search and rescue efforts the group has done here.