Human remains found by volunteer divers in sunken PT Cruiser at Cedar Beach in Mount Sinai

Volunteer divers who said they travel the globe seeking the remains of missing persons believed to be in vehicles underwater discovered the first of several potentially submerged cars they are searching for on Long Island.

William McIntosh, 54, of West Kingston, Rhode Island, and his partner, who would only identify himself as "Diver Dan" from Sydney, Australia, located a sunken and barnacle-covered PT Cruiser at Cedar Beach in Mount Sinai on Monday evening that they believe contained the remains of a missing person.

The volunteer searchers found a bone inside the vehicle and called 911, Suffolk County police Det. Lt. Kevin Beyrer said Tuesday afternoon. Members of the Suffolk police Marine Bureau recovered more human remains inside the white vehicle, which police pulled out of the water just after 2 p.m. Tuesday, Beyrer said.

"There is a missing person who we suspect this driver to be," Beyrer said. "We made a courtesy notification to the family, but we have not definitively made any sort of identification. ... That person had been missing for a number of years."

Beyrer, the commanding officer of the Homicide Squad, said police "believe the vehicle description matches, and we have some items that we recovered that we believe match" the suspected missing person.

No criminality is suspected, Beyrer said.

McIntosh and his partner said they will wait until the police positively identify the remains before speaking publicly about the person both suspect was in the submerged vehicle. However, McIntosh said he spoke Tuesday with the suspected missing person's wife at the scene.

"She was appreciative," McIntosh said. He added that his team learned of her husband through her Facebook post.

"She had come here, she said, every day when she went searching for him," McIntosh said. "This was the place that he always would go. He would sit here all the time and watch the birds."

The remains will be delivered to the medical examiner's office for positive identification, which Beyrer said "should be pretty quick," but "probably not today."

While at the beach Tuesday, before addressing the news media, Beyrer approached a woman who identified herself to Newsday as a relative of the person whose remains she believed were in the car. She was escorted under yellow police tape at he beach parking lot. 

McIntosh and his partner said they will spend the next several weeks looking for sunken vehicles in the waters off Long Island and other areas on the East Coast they believe contain the remains of 50 people. They planned to head to the Valley Stream area for a search Wednesday.

The Cedar Beach discovery marked their third in this latest endeavor, they said, and it's McIntosh’s 16th since a missing persons case in his home state four years ago inspired him to volunteer with a similar organization, the Oregon-based Adventures With Purpose. He later formed a nonprofit in Rhode Island called Exploring With a Mission. McIntosh said Adventures With Purpose is sponsoring Exploring With a Mission’s efforts on Long Island.

"When you find a person, you bring them home and you're able to close a chapter in another person’s life, a family’s life," McIntosh said. "We give them hope. If we don’t find a person, just the fact that we’re out there looking for them gives them hope that they will be found."