BURIED IN THE BASEMENT

FOR DECADES A LONG ISLAND FAMILY SEARCHED FOR THE FATHER WHO HAD SEEMINGLY ABANDONED THEM. NOW A NEW DOCUMENTARY EXPLORES THE UNSETTLING TRUTH

- By LIAM QUINN

TRUTH SEEKER Michael (in a scene from The Secrets We Bury) had the support of his family but says he was "prepared to find my father by myself."

Normally stoic under pressure, Chris Carroll was pale and visibly shaken when he emerged from the basement of his family's house in Lake Grove on Long Island.

“Dad, I think we found something,” he told his father, Michael, in the living room. “You have to go downstairs.” Together, Chris and his brother Mike Jr. had been digging in the basement for months, searching for clues in the mysterious disappearance of their grandfather George Carroll more than five decades before that Halloween eve in 2018.

YOUNG FAMILY George and Dorothy with their children (from left: Steven, Michael, Patricia and Jean) in a photo two years before George went missing.

Michael, who had recently suffered a stroke, required help walking down the stairs but made his way to the large hole in the floor and peered inside. “I thought maybe it was a root or a dog bone,” the retired critical-care technician recalls. “Then I looked again and realized, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely a pelvis bone.’”

DISTANT MEMORY Steven (seen in the documentary) says there used to be a water pump in the basement: "I remember the rectangular hole that ultimately became my father's vault."