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BELEWS LAKE -- When the call came May 2, nearly the entire Greensboro police underwater recovery team responded.

Some of the 11 officers were off duty. Others were at their regular stations, most of them as patrol officers.

They converged that afternoon on Country Park Lake, where a submerged vehicle had been spotted with what looked like a body inside.

“The first thing is, you hope it’s an abandoned car,” said Officer Mike Maul, an eight-year veteran of the police dive team. “And that it’s a coincidence and not who we’re looking for the last couple of days.

“Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.”

You think about that for maybe five seconds, he said.

“Then you have your job to do.”

Recovering the drowning victim at Country Park was one of the more recent and high-profile cases for the dive team, which was formed in the 1960s.

Because of its expertise, the team gets called to help across the state, even though other dive teams have formed over the years. But most of the victims and evidence they’re asked to recover are in Guilford County bodies of water, no matter how big or small.

Inside the car at Country Park, dive team members discovered the body of David Brooks Ferrell Jr., 18, a Page High School senior who had disappeared almost a week before.

Officers David Brendle and Fred Pinson had to dig out mud from the wheel wells to hook chains to the car’s axle so it could be pulled out by a tow truck.

It took a couple of hours, although they spent about 45 minutes to an hour of that underwater.

“The windows were already muddied over,” Pinson said.

During Brendle’s first year on the team, they recovered five drowning victims.

Dive team members know going in that they’re there to recover, not rescue, he said.

“In law enforcement, we’re facing tragedies all the time,” Brendle said. “It kind of goes hand in hand with what we do anyway.”

Nevertheless, peer support teams — officers trained as counselors — are available in such cases.

Being part of the dive team is an extra duty — a volunteer job. Many members became divers to join the team.

They’re called in to find weapons and stolen goods tossed into shallow and deep waters. They’re the ones asked to recover bodies in Greensboro’s lakes, creeks and streams.

“The biggest thing is to provide dignity and closure to the family,” Maul said.

They also get called out for recoveries all across the state, said Sgt. Patti Buser, the dive team’s leader.

In an Alamance County murder-for-hire case, they found a gun in a Chapel Hill lake.

Sometimes, they get more than they’re asked to recover.

In Iredell County, they pulled up a firearm for the sheriff’s office. But it ended up being connected to a different homicide case.

At Oak Hollow Lake, they found two stolen cars, one on top of the other.

A year after recovering one body in a quarry, they dove again and found a car with two people in it who had been missing in the same case.

“So it was a triple homicide,” Buser said. “They ended up making an arrest in it.”

Some cases are more difficult than others. Finding the local teen at Country Park was a hard one emotionally. Kids are always difficult, Maul said.

For Buser, the case of the 3-year-old girl who drowned in a small lake in her grandmother’s backyard still haunts her.

More often, the divers are pulling out evidence and sometimes trash. They’ve found anchors and propellers, sunglasses and beer cans while training and diving for evidence. They’ve pulled up computers, bullets and guns, and once, a store safe.

The team practices twice a month in the summer. They spent Wednesday at Belews Lake, working in part on improving their skills with sonar, which allows them to map out what’s in the lake’s murky depths.

During that practice, three suited up in “dry” gear. Drysuits cover a diver to offer protection against contaminated water.

Divers need help getting into the rubber suits, which include a zipper across the back of the shoulders and a tight skull cap. They put wax on the zipper before the dive to make it watertight.

It took the trio about 10 minutes to dive into 20- to 30-foot water to recover a practice dummy weighted so it would sink to the bottom.

They placed it in a “stokes basket” — a wire litter or stretcher commonly used in search and rescue. The divers used two bags filled with air to slowly raise the basket to the surface and then swam it ashore.

On the boat, Brendle kept in contact with the divers. Before and after the dive, he logged the times and amount of air used.

Maul hauled the dummy back out, and they practiced using the underwater camera.

They haven’t had a chance to use the side-scan sonar, which they also call a “towfish,” because they have to pull the yellow, torpedolike sonar behind the boat.

It can capture images up to about 2,300 feet out, scanning to both sides as well as down. They used to have to wait for the data to be printed by a machine that looks like the seismographs that track earthquakes. But about a year ago, they got a laptop that creates real-time images.

They can use the computer to enlarge areas that might contain an object and to create a grid of what they’ve searched.

“This way, you can do a lot more,” Buser said.

Instead of burning out divers trying to search a large area, the sonar can narrow the search.

They won’t dive deeper than the recreational limit of 130 feet, although few local bodies of water offer anything that deep anyway.

So how shallow do they go?

“We’ve belly-crawled before,” Buser said.

Last month, Pinson was in three feet of water recovering a badly decomposed body in Buffalo Creek. The divers floated a tarp upstream and then slipped it underneath the body to scoop everything into a stokes basket.

Pinson found an unopened Baby Ruth bar in the man’s back pocket. They thought it might have been a cell phone.

It can be a tough job, but still, they volunteer for it. “You’re in a specialized unit where no one else can do it,” Pinson said.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com