News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
A twenty-year-old cold case in White County was solved by a YouTube diver and recovery specialist.
Jeremy Sides runs the account “Exploring With Nug,” a YouTube channel with more than 85,000 subscribers and 11 million views. Sides said that he had spent time searching in various bodies of water, until one morning his sonar search in Calfkiller River led him to the sunken car of Erin Foster, who went missing with Jeremy Bechtel on April 3rd, 2000.
“I marked it and I dove it to see what kind of car it was and sure enough it was them,” Sides said. “I found the tag, all the windows were rolled up, everything was telling me ‘Okay they’re still in there,’ and the tag matched the missing person case so I was 100 percent that this was the car.”
Sides said that he had been in contact with White County Sheriff Steve Page prior to that morning’s search. He said that after the discovery Page was on the scene within minutes. Sides said that the first thing the Sheriff did was give him a hug.
Sides said that he finds cases like Erin’s and Jeremy’s by searching on databases that list missing person cases. He said that he was drawn to this one in White County because everything he had read had led him to believe they were somewhere in a body of water.
“It’s very hard to make a car vanish,” Sides said. “And the fact that they both went missing just one night and then they fell off the face of the planet and the car went missing too, nine times out ten they went in the water. And since Sparta has a river that runs right through the town, it seemed like a case that definitely was worth looking into.”
Sides said that this line of work began as a hobby and soon turned into something more. He said that within the past couple of years he’s met a few groups that started doing this type of work and felt like it was where he needed to be. He said that he’s driven to want to help people, which is why this is the right career for him.
