Earlier this week, Jalopnik reported that divers attempting to solve a cold case found 32 cars in a lake in Doral, Florida. At the time, we assumed there was probably a good reason all those cars were at the bottom of the lake, but as it turns out, there actually might have been something sketchy going on. Shocking, right? Miami-Dade County will probably never be the same again.
CBS News reports that Miami-Dade police have begun pulling the cars out of the lake, and the first car, a “2002 Nissan Ultima,” was confirmed to have been stolen. Now, it’s not surprising that regular people don’t know a lot about cars, as evidenced by the continued use of “Dodge Ram” to describe the Ram 1500, but come on, CBS News. The Altima is one of the most common cars on the road. Odds are, every single person in this country knows at least one person who owns one. What’s next? Are you going to tell us one of the other cars recovered was a 1996 Toyota Kamrie?
But anyway, where were we? Oh yeah. Some of the sunken cars were stolen. “The majority of the vehicles that are in there are very old, leading us to believe that these vehicles were dumped in this lake probably way before these warehouses were even here,” Miami-Dade police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta told CBS News. Doral Mayor Christi Fraga also commented on the discovery, saying, “We obviously don’t want these things happening in our backyard and we hope that they do not continue to happen. It seems as if this area was a hot spot when none of this was developed where cars were driven into the lake.”
According to Zabaleta, homicide detectives are also ready to join the investigation if any of the cars end up being linked to someone’s death, but so far, that hasn’t been the case. “These are most likely the type of vehicles that we are going to find here dumped in this lake. Vehicles that were abandoned and they wanted to get rid of them. Or those that were taken for a joy ride, they were stolen and were dumped inside the lake,” he told CBS News.