A volunteer who assisted a Wisconsin sheriff’s office in the search for a man who is now alleged to have faked his own death is sharing his reaction to the unexpected development.
Keith Cormican — the founder of Bruce’s Legacy, an all-volunteer nonprofit that assists with search and rescue missions as well as recovery efforts from victims of drowning — spoke with Wisconsin news outlet NBC 26 about his role in the search for Ryan Borgwardt, a married father whom police now believe staged his own disappearance.
Cormican, who helped search for Borgwardt by running sonar checks for more than a week in Wisconsin’s Green Lake and boating across the waters for 23 days, said he feels a sense of relief — along with uncomfortable uncertainty about what’s to come.
“My first emotion was, ‘Okay, I didn’t miss him — he just wasn’t there,’ ” Cormican told NBC 26, recalling the moment he learned that Borgwardt is alive.
A map of the area where Bruce’s Legacy searched for Ryan Borgwardt.
Green Lake County Sheriffs Office
“That was certainly very, very tough to deal with emotionally,” he added. “There was many nights that I’d get up in middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep, and I would get up and get on the laptop and start going through sonar data.”
Borgwardt has not been seen by his family or authorities since Aug. 12, when deputies responded to a missing persons call and found his vehicle and trailer in Green Lake County. Sheriff’s office deputies discovered his capsized kayak, fishing pole, car, wallet, driver’s license and keys all unattended near a fishing spot.
But on Nov. 8, Green Lake County Sheriff Mark Podoll said a search of Borgwardt’s laptop that took place in October led investigators to discover that he had replaced his hard drive and deleted his internet browser history the day he vanished. Authorities later found that Borgwardt had taken photos of his passport, moved funds to a foreign bank account, changed his email and communicated with a woman in Uzbekistan.
The sheriff said earlier this month that the father of three had taken out a $375,000 life insurance policy months before he disappeared, and authorities were tipped off when they discovered that his passport had been checked by Canadian law enforcement on Aug. 13, the day after he was reported missing.
Police now believe Borgwardt is “somewhere in Europe.”
Ryan Borgwardt.
Green Lake County Sheriff’s Office
For Cormican — who started his nonprofit after his firefighter brother Bruce Cormicandrowned in 1995 — the initial search kept him awake at night, as he feared letting Borgwardt’s family down if he wasn’t able to find the missing dad.
“The stress of it … emotional feelings of wondering if I missed him … did I let the family down? Did I let the sheriff department down? Did I let the community down?” Cormican told the local station.
Cormican, who now plans to focus on another missing person search in Wyoming that he had to postpone during the search for Borgwardt, said this incident won’t change his mission to find missing people.
“I feel very, very sorry for the family that you know is having to go through this type of circumstances dealing with now what? What happens next for them? Yeah, pretty tough,” Cormican said.
During a press conference earlier this month, Sheriff Podoll urged Borgwardt to come forward for the sake of his children.
“They thought that their dad drowned,” he said on Nov. 8, per local TV station WBAY. “A day ago, they found out that he wasn’t.”
Podoll also thanked Borgwardt’s wife, calling her “one strong lady.”
“Ryan, if you are viewing this, I plead that you contact us or contact your family,” the sheriff said. “We understand that things can happen, but there’s a family that wants their daddy back.”
