Faith kept family going

Published 3:08 pm Tuesday, March 11, 2025

EATONTON, Ga. — Michael Jones said without his faith and that of family members he’s not certain they could have all gotten through the ordeal they just experienced.

One of his brothers, Gary Laron Jones, had been the subject of an intensified water, ground and aerial search by local and state authorities and countless volunteers. The beloved physics teacher, track and field and basketball coach at Westminster Schools in Atlanta had been missing for 29 days and presumed to have drowned following an outing in a small boat with his fiancee Joycelyn Nicole Wilson on Lake Oconee on Saturday afternoon, Feb. 8.

During that time, something tragic happened and the couple were never seen alive again.

Wilson’s body was found floating the next morning by a local resident who had been assisting game wardens with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division with trying to find the victims.

Wilson was a professor in the mathematics department of Spelman College in Atlanta. She and Jones were engaged and had planned to marry sometime in March.

“This has been one of the worse 29 days of our lives,” Michael Jones said after he and three of his first cousins arrived at the Putnam County Fire Department Station No. 10 in Eatonton on Sunday to attend a press conference.

During the exhaustive search for Gary Jones, the family never lost their faith their loved one would be found.

“We depended heavily on our faith,” Michael Jones told reporters. “Our Heavenly Father brought us through. He’s still sustaining us and we have come to a new level of faith, of strength, and we just encourage everyone to pray for us, and also to use this as a catalyst for awareness, for safety, for resources to go to these great programs and to hopefully avoid something like this ever happening again. Especially as it relates to the area where the incident occurred in terms of safety markings and things of that nature. So, we hope for a positive to come out of it.”

Michael went on to say that the Jones family has had overwhelming support from those who loved his brother Gary.

“Gary was a game and life changer,” Michael said. “He helped a lot of people, so that’s why so many folks have come to support. Gary has been a servant of God since his early years as a teenager, and he has done probably what other people have done in 85 or 90 years, Gary has done in 50 years. So, we just hope to carry his legacy on and hope to continue to support agencies and folks like you guys. And again, we just say, thank you.”

Jones’ body was found Sunday afternoon about 12 p.m. by Keith Cormican, a Wisconsin man, who owns and operates “Bruce’s Legacy,” a non-profit organization that is called to help authorities and others in search of drowned victims throughout the country. Keith’s brother, Bruce, was a volunteer firefighter and certified scuba diver who tragically lost lost his life several years ago in Wisconsin.

Cormican was contacted by the Jones family and the end result was the Wisconsin man driving down with his longtime friend, Stuart Fryk to help him try to find the body of Gary Jones in the waters of Lake Oconee. They arrived last Friday and immediately went to work searching Saturday morning. The search yielded nothing that day, but just after a thunderstorm struck Sunday morning, using Towfish sonar equipment that he purchased for $85,000, Cormican found Jones’ body. The area where Jones’ body was found marked the first time that it had been searched by Cormican.

“This was the first time we got into the tree area,” Cormican told reporters. “It’s an underwater forest – in an area that is marked by the buoys and it’s the last area we wanted to cover because the chance of breaking something was very high, so we saved that area.”

All of the deeper water had been covered on Saturday, he said.

“We went to the timber (mound) this morning (Sunday),” Cormican said. “And we started our search, going back and fourth, and with sonar, you know it’s about 45 feet of water off the bottom, and my sonar typically needs to be about 30 feet of water, down 30 feet and 15 feet off the bottom.”

Such wasn’t possible, as it turned out.

“So what we did was just put the Towfish sonar just underneath the surface and as we were doing that, the trees were bouncing off the sonar, pushing our boat around,” Cormican said. “We killed the motor a couple of times because we hit the trees that are there because they come all the way to the surface. So, it’s a treacherous area. Normally, to find bodies in those areas is non-existent. You can’t find them in there because you can’t usually use the sonar equipment.”

As soon as Cormican found Jones’ body, the first person he alerted was Putnam County Sheriff Howard R. Sills, who happened to be in a patrol boat nearby. The sheriff said he was relieved to hear that Jones’ body had was found about 12 p.m. Sunday. 

Jones’ body was recovered from the cold waters of the lake about 1 p.m. The body was in about 45-foot of water of standing timber, according to Sills.

“The body was in very close proximity to where Miss Wilson’s body was found,” Sills said.

Putnam County Coroner Hollis Harrison, who was assisted at the scene by Deputy Coroner Andre Williams, said he officially pronounced Jones deceased at 2 p.m. Sunday, 29 days after he and his fiancee had gone out in a small boat to celebrate Jones’ 50th birthday on Saturday, Feb. 8.

Jones’ body was taken to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Laboratory in Decatur where an autopsy was performed Monday.  A medical examiner said Jones died from accidental drowning, Sills said. The same results were given for what caused the death of Wilson.