The afternoon of March 30 seemed perfect for salmon fishing–sunshine with a light wind–when Tauras and Rimas Gaizutis bought licenses, picked up their cousin and launched their small boat from Hammond Marina.
They never returned. Divers recovered their vessel from the bottom of the Calumet Harbor, but their bodies have not been found, despite a massive, ongoing recovery effort by an Indiana police marine unit.
Lake Michigan can be cruel to families and friends missing loved ones. While in the majority of cases bodies are recovered, sometimes weeks or months later, about a third of those lost in the lake simply vanish.
Three weeks after the fishermen disappeared, members of Chicago’s tight-knit Lithuanian community continue hoping they can put the men’s remains to rest.
In the meantime, they pack churches for prayer services. They watch home movies of the Gaizutis brothers clowning on the beach. After one memorial mass, some tossed yellow and red roses into Lake Michigan.
“I went to a funeral this week for a colleague, and I actually felt jealous that these people had a loved one they can bury,” said the mother of the two brothers, Marija Meskaukas, on Friday.
In the last two years, 99 people have been listed with the U.S. Coast Guard as dead in Lake Michigan. Of those, 34 bodies have never been found.
Before the fishermen disappeared, a young pilot and three passengers were the most recent victims. In February, two months after a single-engine Cessna flown from Wisconsin crashed near Wilmette Harbor, the body of pilot Adam Bukowski, 20, washed up on a southern Michigan beach. The body of his flight instructor, Roger Licht, 61, was found in January.
Bukowski’s wife, Susan, 20, and Licht’s best friend, Carl Thornton, 65, are still missing.
Deputy Cmdr. Ron Kurth is overseeing the recovery of the missing fishermen with the Lake County Sheriff’s Marine Unit in Indiana. The reality, he knows, is grim: Bodies stay on the bottom until the water is above 40 degrees and gases from decomposition bring them to the surface. Near shore lake bottom temperatures this week registered about 45 degrees.
Kurth, who daily sends out helicopters and search boats equipped with underwater cameras, said he hopes to find the bodies before warming waters and currents push them out into the lake.
Other than finding a life jacket and the men’s 16-foot power boat upside-down, undamaged and half-buried in the silt-covered bottom of the Calumet Harbor shipping channel, clues have been scarce.
Both the family and search and rescue officials believe the boat, lacking built-in flotation devices now required by the Coast Guard, quickly sank after it was swamped by waves.
The 35-degree water, Kurth said, may have triggered shock, hypothermia and drowning in 10 to 30 minutes.
The 31-year-old vessel was the same age as Tauras. After graduating in the fall from a Barcelona business school, Tauras was back home in Chicago job hunting. Fishing was a good way to reconnect with his younger brother, Rimas, 30, a self-employed construction worker from Beverly Shores, Ind.
That sunny Saturday, they invited their cousin, Martynas Meskauskas, 28, a Lithuanian musician and artist, for his first American fishing experience.
“We are now receiving tons of e-mails from European fans requesting info of the tragedy,” said an e-mail from Emiliano Lanzoni, an Italian record company manager who represented Meskauskas’ rock band, Anubi. “He is one of the best and most respected underground artists. Everyone is shocked and upset here … no one believes that this could be the end.”
The day after the Coast Guard concluded its two-day search April 2, three dozen relatives and friends from Chicago and across the country walked 50 miles of Indiana and Michigan beaches. The piles of broken fishing tackle and tattered clothing they gathered revealed nothing.
Now they try to remember the good times, many of which happened on Lake Michigan.
Growing up in Chicago, the brothers attended Brother Rice High School and summered at their family’s lake house in Indiana. They joined the Lithuanian Sea Scouts in Chicago, filled their days with beach volleyball and their summer nights with bonfires made with Lake Michigan driftwood.
Identical in their fun-loving personalities, they differed only in the clothes they wore and their career choices, said their sister, Vida Gaizutis, 27.
Rimas hoped to open his own construction business with friends to support his 5-year-old son, who lives with the child’s mother in Ohio.
Tauras studied business at the University of Illinois at Chicago and worked in finance for several years before moving to Spain and graduating last winter with a master’s degree in business.
While in Europe he encouraged his cousin, Martynas Meskauskas, to exhibit his artwork in the U.S. Though only in Chicago since October, his paintings and sketches had appeared in at least two local galleries.
Family members said they are coping. Marija Meskauskas, a chemistry professor at DePaul University, helped to pack her sons’ belongings this week. Vida Gaizutis, a veterinary student, has put her studies on hold.
“Someone must have seen something. I want people to search their memories and tell us if they remember anything,” she said.
Friends and family plan to start a college fund for Rimas’ son. They are considering plans for a boating safety and education foundation.
Though he is eager to find his friends, Kovaldas Balciauskas said he finds some peace when he gazes on Lake Michigan.
“It looks different–I know they are part of the water,” he said. “That helps me a little bit.”
