VOLUNTEER DIVER JUAN HEREDIA A Hero's Mission to Find the Lost

HE JUST WANTED TO LEND A HAND TO A MOM WHOSE SON VANISHED IN A RIVER LAST YEAR. THEN HE LEARNED HOW MANY OTHER PEOPLE ALSO NEED HIS HELP

- SUSAN YOUNG

In March 2024 Juan Heredia saw another parent’s plea for help with their teenage son and couldn’t get it out of his head. Fifteen-year-old Xavier Martinez had made a fatal mistake when he jumped into the Calaveras River next to his high school in Stockton, Calif., and never came back out. Official rescue teams scoured the water for six days to no avail.

His mother, Amanda Martinez, began appearing on the local news, and Heredia and his daughter Camila, who’d gone to school in the same district as Xavier, decided to go out to the site of Xavier’s disappearance and ran into Amanda.

Xavier Martinez, 15 The teen was a loving soul, helping raise his two younger brothers, says mom Amanda. After Heredia recovered Xavier's body in Stockton, Calif., in 2024, she called him "my angel."

A former general contractor and house-flipper by day, Heredia, 53, is also a certified diver and scuba instructor who grew up navigating the murky river water of his native Argentina. (As a boy, he was quick to jump in after lost fishing hooks since replacements proved costly.) When he met with Xavier’s mom last year, she said she felt Xavier was lying underwater in the shade of a tree. Almost as soon as Heredia went in, that’s where he found the boy—head tilted toward the sun, hands held as though in silent prayer. “He was like an angel,” Heredia says. “Something I never expected to see.”