Rapture of the Deep

According to three notes that Spialter later posted on a Website, Scott Stanley, Walsweer, and Coughlin swam down a passage, and he lost sight of them for a few seconds. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the three swam back into the pump room, which seemed crowded. The motion of their flippers kicked up the fine, sandy silt. Visibility evaporated.

No one followed, so Spialter returned to the opening. Then, suddenly, he saw a gloved hand reach toward him. He thought it was Scott. He grabbed the hand and tugged. Scott pulled away.

Spialter waited there, hoping his friends would emerge. Then he waited some more. Finally, when he couldn't wait any longer because of low oxygen, he turned and left. It likely took him a couple of minutes to reach the back-up tanks. Once outside the ship he hesitated again. Should he try to take the extra tanks back to his friends? What if he missed seeing them along the way, and they reached the outside of the wreck, low on air, then discovered the bottles weren't there?

He decided to return to the surface and tell the boat captain that his friends were in trouble. Spialter shot up much faster than was prudent — without decompressing. He yelled that his three buddies were lost inside the ship, then descended into the water again to decompress.

It was just after 10:00 a.m. Soon other divers on boats and back at the Key Largo docks heard the urgent call on their marine radios: three missing divers aboard the Spiegel Grove.

At 10:15 the Coast Guard, the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, and the Key Largo Fire Department all readied their boats. Five minutes later two divers from another boat surfaced with an unconscious man. It turned out to be Kevin Coughlin. The Coast Guard rushed him to shore, where an ambulance awaited. Coughlin was dead by the time he reached the doors of Mariner's Hospital, but doctors didn't make the official pronouncement until 11:50 a.m.

Rob Bleser — the fire department captain and Spiegel Grove project manager — was one of the many who heard the emergency call. He rallied two of his wreck-certified dive team members. At around noon, he piloted the fire department's rescue boat out to the wreck. The volunteer divers returned with bad news: Scott Stanley and Jonathan Walsweer were dead. The pair was 134 feet down, inside the ship's pump room, with the air regulators out of their mouths and their tanks empty.

Even after hearing Spialter's emotional retelling of the dive, no one could figure out what had happened.

The bodies were recovered the next day. The medical examiner termed the official cause of death as drowning.

Sheriff's department Captain Mark Coleman says the men did several things wrong: They didn't file a dive plan with their dive charter captain, they didn't use their own safety line, and they went into a part of the ship that was off limits.

But wreck divers are known for breaking the rules; Coleman admitted that prior to that fateful day in March, some divers — not Stanley's group — had cut the chains and pried open hatches to penetrate the wreck. It wasn't the job of the sheriff's office, or the Coast Guard, or anyone, really, to check on the wreck every day. And after all, divers including Spialter, Scott Stanley, Walsweer, and Coughlin sign waivers agreeing not to penetrate too deep into wrecks. "These men were well beyond where any sport diver should go," says Coleman. "They made a lot of mistakes."

Spialter didn't speak with any media after the tragedy. Someone who answered his telephone in New Jersey said that he "would never be able to talk" about the tragedy.

However three days after his friends died, someone claiming to be him posted some comments online in a news forum, topix.com, about the accident.

"I ask that everyone respect the memories of my dear friends and not speculate as to what happened. Planes crash, cars crash, skydivers occasionally are not successful, and the dive community is not immune to accidents. Please be respectful and accept that accidents happen. I continue to live with this tragedy. Please do not compound it," he wrote.

Spialter — or someone posing as him — also responded on topix.com to the criticisms posted on several other online dive boards, including scubaboard.com and decostop.com. On sites read by tens of thousands of people, divers had attacked the four friends for being careless.

A man named Jim H., from Dayton, Ohio, said that "what went wrong was their ego," and called them "stupid" for going into the Spiegel Grove without proper equipment or training.