A mystery beneath the surface: Why are divers dying in the same spot at this Rockport beach?

Boston Globe

5 days ago

Just before 6 p.m., as the sun dipped low in the sky, their families stood on Front Beach and watched search boats slowly sweep a grid in front of them. When one of those boats stopped just offshore, they knew the second diver, 78-year-old Richard Brady, was dead, too.
Now they wanted to know why.
Why did two experienced divers, in shallow water at a sandy beach on a 72-degree day, with plenty of air left in their tanks, just die? What was the connection?
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Visibly, there was nothing wrong with either man. Neither showed signs of an attack or an entanglement. The State Police divers who pulled Brady from the seafloor went through each man's gear and found nothing wrong with it.
When Brady's son, Bill, identified his body after it was returned to shore, he said 'he looked almost peaceful.'
Everyone believed there had to be something wrong with their air. They must have gotten their tanks filled together and somehow carbon monoxide or some other contaminant had crept in. That's what the family and the harbormaster and the State Police all assumed, as investigators waited late into the night for a state hazmat testing team to arrive from Amherst.
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The air tanks worn by Alan Leao and Richard Brady when they mysteriously died while scuba diving in 2023.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
But the field test found nothing. The air looked as clean as what was in the tanks the rescue divers had just used.
Then what's the connection?
That's the question that has haunted everyone involved.
Or perhaps it's the alternative that's done the most haunting. That there is no connection. There is only coincidence, one that requires you to believe that a seemingly one-in-a-million event was immediately followed by a nearly identical one-in-a-million event.
It was hard for everyone to accept those odds. And it became harder when a video of the entire incident, captured by a town camera on the other side of the cove, revealed a shocking number of similarities in the final minutes of each man's life.
Including one similarity that is probably nothing. But could be everything.
They weren't even really going diving. Brady and Leao were just planning to get wet and make sure their gear was solid before they left the next week for a dream dive trip to Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela. Just making sure they didn't need a new strap on their fins or something. Brady's parking receipt showed he only paid for an hour on the meter.
Brady (left) skied 40-50 days per year. Leao still played on a soccer team.
Alan O. Leao Jr.
Leao was married to Brady's half-sister, who died suddenly from a stroke in 2010. Family members said the two men were quite opposite temperamentally — Leao was a fun-loving Brazilian who came to the United States to play soccer in his 20s; Brady was a buttoned-up engineer who grew up in Somerville and spent his career working on air defense systems for MITRE Corporation. Leao lived in Pepperell, where he raised a son and a daughter; Brady helped raised his son and daughter in Tewksbury, before he and his wife retired to Hampton, N.H.
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Brady had been a diver most of his life, held several advanced certifications, and loved taking on big dives, such as to World War II shipwrecks in Japan. 'He approached them with the meticulousness of a pilot running through a checklist,' his son, Bill, said.
Leao, who came from a well-off family in Brazil, worked as a laborer and truck driver in the US, jobs he loved but were frowned upon by his family back home. His son, Alan Jr., said the first time his grandmother came from Brazil to visit him, 'she looked at his hands and said 'Leaos don't have calluses.''
After Leao's wife died, Brady persuaded him to try scuba diving, and soon enough the two had become regular dive buddies.
There are no young 70-somethings, but both were active — Leao still played on a soccer team, and Brady skied 40 to 50 days a year — and felt ready to bite off an ambitious trip to as far down as you can get in the Caribbean.
On the morning they died, Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023, they met at a Dunkin', according to Brady's family, and followed each other to Front Beach, a popular dive spot they each had experience with.
Front Beach, and even more so Back Beach right next to it, is beloved for offering a nice soft access to the ocean. Shallow sandy bottom. A few boulders. Minimal waves and current. There's a reason generations of scuba classes have taken place there. In the New England ocean, it's probably the closest thing you can get to a swimming pool.
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Front Beach in Rockport at low tide.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
At 9:53 a.m. on the timestamped video, you can see them park their trucks back-to-back, just next to the stairs that lead down to the sand. Then they each started the laborious process of layering on all the gear: the thick wetsuits, the weight belts, the masks and snorkels, the buoyancy vests that inflate or deflate to control depth, and the heavy air tanks they will carry on their backs.
Richard Brady was ready first, and the video shows him walking down the stairs carrying his fins and his floating dive buoy, which holds the red-and-white-striped flag that signals a diver is swimming below.
The video is just far enough away that you can see him, but not really. It's from a perch far on the other side of the cove, behind Brothers' Brew Coffee Shop, and the man is tiny in the distance.
Brady entered the ocean right along the rocky point that defines the northern end of the beach. He followed the rock wall out to chest deep water,
and at 10:25 a.m. stopped and began to do something. The video is too grainy to say what exactly, but he stayed there for a few minutes, just next to two large rocks.
He needed to put on his fins. That's probably what he's doing. He'll be found wearing one. But all you can really see on the video is if he's above the water or below. He disappeared and resurfaced a few times. He could be fiddling with his breathing regulator. He could be peeing. Whatever it is, he's up and down until 10:31 a.m., when he disappeared beneath the water for what would be the final time.
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Up at the trucks, Leao was still struggling to get into his gear. Video clips from a second camera, across the street at The Cove at Rockport hotel, show two passersby
helping him.
Brady was underwater and out of sight when Leao finally made it to the stairs at 10:39 a.m. As he started down the steps, Fran Auciello and her granddaughter were about to come up.
'I said to my granddaughter, 'Let's let him go down the steps first, he's about to go scuba diving,'' Auciello recalled. His reply still haunts her.
'He said 'We'll see,'' Auciello said. 'He had a smile on his face. He was very pleasant. But I just found it odd and concerning for a couple reasons, partly because he was an older gentleman and I didn't see anyone else with him. I found it really unsettling.'
She watched him walk to the water, and noticed he wasn't moving quickly. 'I wouldn't say he was struggling. It's not like he was falling over. But it wasn't a very vigorous walk, which also concerned me.'
At 10:40 a.m., nine minutes after Brady disappeared beneath the surface, Leao reached the shoreline, where Brady's dive flag had just washed up. Divers typically hold the line or connect it to a belt. Leao stopped to examine the dive flag for 15 seconds, then continued into the water.
That's when the coincidences start piling up.
Leao took the exact same route into the ocean as Brady. And at 10:45 a.m., he arrived at the two large boulders in chest-deep water, close enough to shore that it would be where you'd throw a tennis ball for a dog.
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Two large boulders on Front Beach.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
And, like Brady, Leao stopped and did … something. Put his fins on, apparently, but it seems like something more than that. He is there for nine minutes, and like Brady he disappeared beneath the water and then reappeared a few times.
At 10:54 a.m., Leao went under for the final time.
Eight minutes later, his unconscious body can be seen washing onto the shoreline, directly behind where he last went under.
Fran Auciello was the first to spot him in the shallow water, and ran to ask him if he needed help. When he didn't respond, she yelled for her husband. You can see him and others run toward the water to drag Leao onto the sand. Auciello raced to call 911.
The official report from the Essex district attorney's office did not arrive until the following May. The 128-page document concluded that the two men had accidentally drowned.
This was a non-answer, as far as Brady's son, Bill, was concerned. He was infuriated to read that the lead investigator, a
State Police detective working under the district attorney's office, had never sent the tanks to a lab to test the air. This despite the fact that the person
who administered the field test, from the state's Joint Hazardous Incident Response Team, wrote in his report that he had 'informed MSP to have the air tested in a lab.'
The State Police detective, Trooper Alexander M. Smith, asked the Navy to examine the air tanks, the report shows, but he was
turned away because Navy experts wouldn't touch a tank already tested by someone else. When the tanks were returned to the family with the report, Bill Brady paid to send them to a lab in San Diego that specializes in scuba testing.
Still, the answer was the same. The air in the tanks was clean. So it had to be something else.
How else do you explain that two men went into the same tiny area of ocean, in shallow water near two large rocks, and then just died?
Richard Brady, photographed about 15 years ago.
Courtesy Brady family
Bill Brady obsessed over the video. The first time, it was incredibly hard to watch his father and uncle disappear beneath the surface. But later, it became a puzzle. His office, on the second floor of a converted barn next to his house in Newbury, where he runs his chiropractic practice, is filled with information from the various threads he's run to exhaustion trying to solve the mystery.
Among his biggest curiosities is if there was something under the water itself that could have killed them, he said. 'Maybe something that looks interesting and they touched it and
zap.
'
There's no record of power lines being down there, authorities said, and State Police divers saw nothing. Neither did the Rockport harbormasters when inspecting the area with an underwater camera.
Then what about a torpedo ray? That's a type of electric ray that can give you a good jolt, up to 220 volts — enough to disorient a diver and potentially knock them unconscious.
Torpedo rays aren't common in Massachusetts, but as fits this story, one of the only reliable places they've been found is along the Cape Ann coast in Rockport and Gloucester, according to Micah Dean, a marine biologist who works for the state Division of Marine Fisheries.
In 2011, a lobster diver off the coast of Rockport was
Bill Brady continued to look for other potential connections, and became fascinated by this 'bonkers thing,' which was when you looked at the amount of air left in their tanks, each man breathed nearly identical amounts.
Bill Brady held one of the wetsuits worn by his father and uncle when they died while scuba diving off Front Beach in 2023.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Looking at his father's dive computer, a device that records data like depth and dive time, Bill saw that his father had not gone deeper than 6 feet when he was still breathing. Leao did not even go that deep, based on the video. (His computer did not record the dive.)
'If they got into trouble, they could have solved it by simply standing up,' Bill said as he walked through the video one morning at his home. 'Nothing they did put them in mortal danger for a scuba diving accident.'
The best-known dangers for divers happen on ascent. If they come up too quickly, they can get decompression sickness, commonly known as 'the bends.' If they hold their breath on the way up, they can get an air embolism.
But at their shallow depth, neither of those risks
would be on the table, according to Dr. Jim Caruso, a former Navy diver who is Denver's chief medical examiner and a leading expert on diving deaths.
Caruso has published extensively on the subject and lectured to other medical examiners all over the world about how to study a diving death. Among the points he repeats is that it's almost never bad air and that it's not enough to say the person drowned. That's like saying a person in a plane crash died from impact.
You need to figure out why they drowned, and if there's no obvious answer then the most likely scenario is a sudden cardiac incident, potentially an arrhythmia that knocks you unconscious but does not show up directly on an autopsy.
'So this could just be two old men who have a cardiac event, but that still feels a bit hmmm,' Caruso said. 'In medicine, we try not to rely on coincidences.'
Alan Leao with four of his grandchildren, about a year before he died.
Courtesy Leao family
Caruso reviewed the medical examiner's reports for Brady and Leao, which were provided by their families. He saw two old men with enough developing heart issues that if they'd been found dead on their couches, he said, 'they'd be signed out as cardiac disease.'
But they also had lungs full of fluid. 'Copious,' according to the autopsy reports by Dr. Christina Stanley, the state medical examiner who examined both bodies. So it is not incorrect to say they drowned. And, according to Caruso, you can say they probably each drowned due to an underlying cardiac event.
So it's a coincidence. 'Except I don't believe in coincidences,' Scott Story, the Rockport harbormaster, likes to say. It's one of the few things he'll state on the record about Leao and Brady.
He didn't believe it was a coincidence on the day they died. And he believed it less when, on a nice October day a year later, he found a third dead diver in the same spot.
On Oct. 19, 2024, a 50-year-old man named
Malak Hanna went diving at Front Beach. With him was
Jorge Schettini, who told Rockport police Hanna had contacted him to learn how to catch lobster.
After a pre-dive safety check, Schettini wrote in a statement for police,
they headed into the water with full air
tanks. Hanna dove well,
Schettini
wrote, and
was able to pick up several crabs, 'but no luck with lobsters.'
When Schettini's tank was half empty, he gave Hanna the signal to turn back. On the return to shore, Hanna continued to stop to pick up crabs and to try to catch lobsters, according to the statement. When they were close to shore, Schettini turned back to look for Hanna 'and I didn't see him.'
Visibility was only about 4 feet, and Schettini
urgently searched for Hanna, surfacing to look for him or his dive flag, before diving back under. 'I was very nervous,' he wrote. He searched until his air ran out, and dropped his weight belt to surface quickly. 'I started swimming to the shore as fast as I can,' he wrote, and hustled to his car to grab his phone and call 911.
Story and his co-harbormaster, Rosemary Lesch, rushed to the scene by boat and found Hanna's body in 12 to 14 feet of water at the end of a rock wall — the same wall where Brady and Leao last disappeared under the surface a year earlier.
Hanna was originally from Egypt, according to neighbors,
and lived with his wife and three children in Shrewsbury
.
But the family was evicted after Hanna's death, and
no one could say where they went.
A phone number listed on eviction records is no longer in service. Schettini, whose Framingham address on a police report about the incident is also listed online as a diving instruction business, did not respond to numerous inquiries from the Globe.
It would seem the only connection Hanna shares with Leao and Brady is the location. They all died within shouting distance of each other, doing the same activity.
But Hanna's death raises other questions. Divers say it's strange that Hanna couldn't have just surfaced
if he was running out of air or had another problem. At that depth, there was almost zero chance of embolism or decompression sickness. It would basically be like coming up from the bottom of a swimming pool.
When Story and Lesch found Hanna's body underwater, the line connecting him to his dive buoy was wrapped around one leg, but there's no way to know if that happened before or after he died.
Hanna's air tank was empty when he was found. His death was determined to be an accidental drowning, like Leao's and Brady's, and police closed the case.
A few months later, Story and Lesch took this reporter out on the harbormaster's boat to tour the scene, and as the boat idled slowly across the spot where their sonar picked up Hanna, Story said: 'It's the Bermuda Triangle.'
Story doesn't want to say much about the deaths. He's thought about them, but what is there to say, really? Three terrible things happened, all in this one small area, all at this one small beach.
He's tried to connect the dots. He studied the video of Leao and Brady. And then they found a third diver in nearly the same spot, in the same month, one year later.
On the tour of that small stretch of ocean, he answered nearly every question the same way: with a shrug.
They're unrelated. Probably. That's the current consensus. Three separate events. Because there's nothing to overrule coincidence.
Or in the case of Leao and Brady, the connection that matters most is the obvious one. They were men in their 70s, each
carrying some 50 pounds of scuba gear down to the beach and then wading out, which is significant exertion no matter your age.
So independent cardiac events. Bill Brady believes it's the most likely explanation, though it still doesn't click the lock for him. 'The day before he died, my dad and I were removing the docks at our house in Maine. He was 78, but he was fit. For it to happen to both of them is so improbable.'
And so it haunts the families. And the investigators. And the harbormasters. And the people who were on the beach that day. And anyone who has come anywhere near this case. It was a struggle to accept that two men died in the same spot doing the same thing, and it's pure coincidence. And then it happened again a year later.
Scott Story cannot accept that. And so the harbormaster again repeats what has become his mantra for this puzzle: 'I don't believe in coincidences.'
Even if that's all this is.
Billy Baker can be reached at