Share This Article
The Baxter County Coroner’s Office is testing a handheld sonar device that uses artificial intelligence to find human bodies underwater, and it wants the county’s help paying for one.
Coroner Sam Seamans brought the device to the Baxter County Quorum Court on Aug. 4 and spent much of the meeting explaining what it does. The unit is on loan from the manufacturer, which lends them out for a couple of weeks so agencies can try them in the field. Seamans stopped short of asking justices for money.
“I’m not coming to the Quorum Court to say, hey, give us $13,000 for this badly needed piece of equipment,” he said. “I wouldn’t reject it if you did.”
Justices took the hint anyway. Before the meeting ended, they agreed to add the device to the agenda for the budget committee meeting later this month. County Judge Kevin Litty, who presides over the court, said he allowed the presentation but reminded Seamans that any purchase has to move through the budget process.
The device is the AquaEye Pro, made by a company called VodaSafe. It weighs about three pounds, floats, and can be operated by one person standing on a beach, wading in the water or leaning over the side of a boat.
It works on the same principle as a fish finder. Sound waves bounce off whatever is underwater and return a signature, and software reads that signature to guess what the object is. A sunken log, a tire, a car and a human body all echo differently.
“Human, we’re solid, but we’re also partly hollow,” Seamans told the court.
The sorting is done by software trained to tell one echo from another. “AI has figured out, hey, that’s a log, that’s an old standing tree, that’s a barrel, that’s most likely a person,” Seamans said.
The screen marks likely human targets with a red X and possible targets with a yellow circle. It also reports how far away the target is and how deep. Murky water and low visibility do not affect it much, because it reads sound rather than light.
Chief Deputy Coroner Sara Fischer started looking into the device in March. She has taken five classes on operating it, mostly because the programming changes depending on the water. A clear lake and a moving river require different settings.
Fischer took the loaner unit to Bull Shoals Lake and ran more than 100 scans. She sent two divers down to roughly 40, 70, 80 and 100 feet, then scanned from the surface, from the water and from over the side of a boat.
When the divers surfaced, they checked their dive watches against her readings. She said the device was accurate to within about two feet.
“It provides a picture in under 45 seconds, and every time I was able to successfully see both people,” Fischer said.
That speed is the whole argument. A drowning in Baxter County currently pulls in the sheriff’s office, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and boat-mounted sonar can take an hour or more to produce a usable image. Fischer said the Corps and Game and Fish are aware of her testing and support the idea.
“The cost savings associated with finding a drowning victim aren’t just included in our office or with law enforcement,” she said. “You’re talking multiple agencies out looking for these people.”
She also said there is no other unit like it in the state. “So it could be something that we could utilize as a mutual aid type situation,” she said.
The county has plenty of water to search. “We have two huge lakes here. We’ve got rivers. There are big ponds in this county. We’ve got quarries that are deep,” Seamans said. “As we all know, every year there’s more than one drowning.”
The most recent one took five weeks. Mark Alan Hanes, 48, of Lakeview, was reported missing at Bull Shoals Lake on April 25 after he did not come back from the dock, according to the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office. His vehicle was still parked where he left it.
Searchers looked for days without finding him. Army Corps rangers doing routine boat dock checks came across his body on June 1, southwest of the Howard Creek boat ramp. Seamans said he turned up close to where investigators had guessed he went into the water.
Other recent cases resolved faster. Glenn Bradley, 49, of Baxter County, went into Norfork Lake from a broken-down boat in the Float Creek area on Sept. 15, 2025, and a citizen spotted his body two days later about 30 yards from shore. Darren M. Martin, 31, of Gamaliel, drowned in June 2024 when his car ran off the causeway at Pigeon Creek Park, and a sheriff’s diver brought him up the same afternoon.
One case has never closed. “Currently, we have a cold case for a gentleman that has been down for years,” Fischer said. “We know he went down. We know about where he went down. And we haven’t been able to close that case because the body was never recovered.”
She said the device is built to pick up more than intact bodies. It is programmed to recognize partially decomposed and skeletal remains, “which is huge for those cold cases that sometimes have been submerged for years,” she said.
There is a second argument the office makes, and it is about money. When a body comes out of the water badly decomposed, the coroner often cannot tell by looking whether the person was injured before drowning, and the case goes to the state crime lab. Fischer said a body found within hours instead of weeks can usually be examined and identified locally.
That lets the office rule out injuries on its own, she said, “and it saves us from having to spend more time and more money to send that person down to the state crime lab.”
Fischer was blunt about where she wants this to end up. “At some point I would like to purchase this device, and I would like the county support, to whatever extent that looks like, if any,” she said. “But that’s my intention.”
For Seamans, the case for the device is simpler than either speed or cost.
“Every single case we work at the Baxter County coroner’s office involves a family,” he said. “That’s who I talk to. That’s who calls me.”
He said a device that could find someone within hours of a drowning, or within a day, “would mean an awful lot to me.”
Then he told the court about a child who drowned years ago and took four or five days to find. “That is excruciating for people who are waiting to have some resolution,” he said.
The device is not the county’s yet. Seamans said the loaner has to go back next week, and he and Fischer plan to put it in the water at least once more before it does.
“So far it doesn’t seem anything we’d regret having, based on the technology,” he said.
Fischer said she expects one more test outside the county. She was asked the day of the meeting to bring the office’s cadaver dog to another county to look for someone believed to be under about 40 feet of water, and she planned to take the sonar unit along.
Litty said the trial run is the point. “I think it’s good to let them experiment with it before they make that purchase,” he said, “because you don’t want to spend $18,000 and two weeks later you don’t like it, or there’s something different that you would rather have.”
Some figures the office cited come from the manufacturer rather than independent testing. VodaSafe says one operator can scan roughly two acres in less than five minutes, and Fischer said training materials from the company credit the device with cutting search times by about 90 percent and report one set of agencies finding all 54 of their drowning victims in under an hour. Seamans said the retail price is about $18,000, with a government price near $13,000. The company does not publish pricing.
Seamans said he would prefer the higher-priced package, which comes with a tablet that stitches multiple scans into a single map. That would let crews build a search grid and mark off water they have already cleared.
