At first, it was just about garbage.

Three years ago, Jared Leisek and his friend Sam Gill began diving in Oregon’s rivers, posting cleanup videos to YouTube under the name Adventures With Purpose. Their goal was simple: remove 2,000 pounds of underwater trash in three months.

They filmed the treasures they pulled up — lost phones, beer cans, an occasional bicycle. The audience loved it. But one dive would change everything.

While searching the murky depths near Portland, their sonar picked up the unmistakable outline of a car sitting 40 feet below.

“We went in for that car,” Jared recalls. “Then we found two more. Then three more. It just snowballed.”

And with that discovery, a small environmental channel accidentally became one of America’s most unexpected investigative teams — solving cold cases police couldn’t.

As word spread, families of the missing began to reach out.

One of the first was 22-year-old Nathan Ashby’s sister in Warrenton, Missouri. Nathan had vanished months earlier, his truck last seen near the Missouri River. Investigators had sonar images but couldn’t dive the fast current.

“I just need to know,” his sister pleaded in a video call. “Please, can you look for him?”

Jared turned to Sam.

“Are you up for a 32-hour drive to Missouri?”
Sam didn’t hesitate.
“Copy that.”

By 9 a.m. they were in the water. By 6 p.m., they had located Nathan’s truck — and inside, the remains that ended his family’s agonizing search.

“That’s when it hit us,” Jared said. “We weren’t just cleaning rivers anymore. We were cleaning hearts.”

The Pandemic Pause — and a Promise

When COVID-19 shut the world down, the team regrouped. After 30 days indoors, they met again by a quiet riverbank and decided to take on something bigger: a cross-country road trip to help as many families as possible.

They worked 30 cases that year — and solved two. Each success made the next dive harder, deeper, and more emotional.

The Deepest Dive

In one chilling recovery, sonar showed a Mazda 6 buried inside a swirling underwater vortex. Visibility was zero.

“There’s a shoe in there,” Sam radioed.
Then silence.
Moments later:

“Call the cops. Call the cops.”

Inside the vehicle were the remains of Timothy Robinson, missing 12 years earlier. His family had kept a note he’d left behind:

“I’m going to the river… taking myself out.”

For 12 years, no one knew if it was true. That day, they finally did.

Every diver has a moment that stays with them forever. For Jared, it came in the still waters of Cascade County, Montana.

A husband named David Goff had been searching for his wife, Tammy, for more than two and a half years. She’d vanished one morning in 2018, leaving no trace but her truck keys.

“I kept thinking she’d drive back up the driveway,” he said softly. “That she just needed time away.”

When local searches failed, David called Adventures With Purpose.

Four days later, sonar pinged on a familiar shape — a truck in 10 feet of water.

“Who’s he looking for?” a crew member whispered on camera.
“You found something?”
“Yeah… we found a truck.”

Moments later, the license plate confirmed it. Tammy Goff.

The divers surfaced quietly, the air heavy with the weight of years.

“The moment they told me,” David said, “it was like 148 weeks of pressure lifted off my shoulders.”

He finally had an answer — not the one he’d prayed for, but the one he needed to breathe again.

Since that first accidental discovery, Adventures With Purpose has found over 16 missing people across America — fathers, daughters, soldiers, and mothers whose names had long faded from headlines.

Their YouTube videos reach millions, but Jared insists it isn’t fame that drives them.

“Families kept saying, ‘You gave us closure,’” he explains. “But it’s not closure we give — it’s answers. Because you never close the book on someone you love.”

Each dive ends the same way: with a moment of silence on the water, bubbles rising and fading into stillness.

For the families left behind, those ripples mean everything — proof that even in the darkest depths, truth can surface.