Using traditional tracking methods and high-tech photography, the Down East Emergency Medicine Institute of Bangor has helped locate the body of a Middlebury College student 105 days after he went missing, DEEMI Director Richard Bowie reported Wednesday.

The body, tentatively identified as Nicholas Garza, 19, of Albuquerque, N.M., and a student at Middlebury, was removed Tuesday night from Otter Creek – an area where DEEMI urged law enforcement officials to focus after finding evidence in high-resolution aerial images they had taken in mid-April.

“I’ve never seen a search with so much information about where the person is,” Bowie said. “We just couldn’t get him because the waterline was so high.”

Once they saw evidence of a body in the photos, DEEMI requested that Julie Jones of Brewer and her dog, Quincy, confirm their findings by going to Vermont and attempting to track Garza’s scent.

Quincy is a specially trained scent-detection search dog with the Volunteer K9 Scent Specific Search and Recovery team, a nonprofit organization based in Virginia that provides scent-specific services nationwide to law enforcement agencies, missing person organizations, emergency management agencies, and sometimes even families.

Jones had Quincy search for Garza’s “live scent” starting at the fifth floor of the dormitory where he was last seen. Quincy quickly caught the scent and tracked it all the way to the river.

“I saw [Quincy] heading right toward the river and he jumped in, which signifies that the person went in,” Jones said.

She noted that a trail nearby goes to a footbridge, but said that even in the daylight she walked by without noticing the path.

“Obviously being at night, there’s no doubt why he missed it,” Jones said.

Jones switched Quincy into cadaver mode and the dog immediately caught Garza’s scent again.

“For us, that’s what we needed to do,” Jones said. “We needed to go down there. We needed to help the family with closure.”

DEEMI and Jones become involved with different missing persons cases in a variety of ways – through law enforcement requests, volunteering, or at the appeal of family members.

In the case of Garza, Vermont State Police requested that DEEMI fly out to take aerial photos of the grounds around the college.

Volunteers Gary Soucy and Al Jenkins made the trip to Vermont and took 741 images of the area around the Vermont college using a high-resolution Nikon camera.

“They did it again,” Bowie said. “This is the fourth body this year they’ve found from the air.”

The images taken by the two men were sent to Volunteer Imagery Analysts for Search and Rescue in Ohio by a T-1 line set up at the University of Maine.

Once the photos are uploaded to the VIASAR server, any of the volunteer analysts, using a password, can log on to any personal computer to gain access to the images, he said.

VIASAR, which has a business office in Blue Hill, is a nonprofit affiliate of DEEMI that is dedicated to providing advanced imagery analysis services to search and rescue organizations across the country.

“We located where the body should be and based on that information we were able to tell the police department, based on a hydrology study that DEEMI did, where to look,” Bowie said. “They pulled the body out yesterday afternoon around 3:50 p.m. and [his clothing] matched exactly the colors that we gave them based on our search.”

Before the Vermont search, DEEMI last was dispatched out of state in March to search for a missing Mississippi woman.

Virginia Ratliff, 82, of Brookhaven, Miss., had been missing for more than three weeks at that time and she still hasn’t been found.

“They believe that something terrible has happened to her now,” Bowie said.

Four people have been reported missing after leaving the VA hospital where Ratliff had been visiting her husband before her disappearance.

Police in Virginia have found two of the four missing persons dead in their vehicles, Bowie said. Authorities say the motive is stealing the victims’ money and cars.

Most recently DEEMI members have been searching for Chuck Springer, 68, of Belmont who has been missing for more than a week.

They have taken aerial photos and want to confirm their findings in the same way they did in the Garza case by having Jones and Quincy track Springer’s scent.

“But we still don’t have a scent article from the warden’s service so we can’t trail the victim,” Bowie said.

The technology has been successfully used by DEEMI in numerous searches in Maine, including for a 3-year-old girl who apparently drowned last April in the Aroostook River; for missing Bangor man Matt Lacrosse whose body was recovered from the Penobscot River last month; and for a fisherman who was missing off Little Deer Isle.

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