MORO, Illinois — 5 On Your Side has confirmed Friday that Dennis Ray Watter passed away early Tuesday morning at Christian Northeast hospital after his battle with renal cancer.
The Wood River native was the founder and owner of Team Watters Sonar, Search and Recovery. He ran the service with Tammy Watters as a husband-wife team for more than 10 years.
He was born on Sept. 13, 1958, to Lester and Sylvia Watters. He married Tammy at the Edwardsville Courthouse in the late-80s. He was 64.
According to a funeral home in Bethalto, who has an online site for obituaries, the family created a Life Tributes page to make it easy to share public memories, read his obituary and service arrangements.
The family said on the page that Dennis received numerous certificates for his work.
From 2005 until today, 104 people have been recovered and returned to their families, the family said.
Dennis worked all over the country with several law enforcement agencies and conservationists. Dennis was also an award-winning crappie fisherman.
In 2018, 5 On Your Side initially brought you the story of a couple who devoted their life to finding people who drown by accident, suicide and more.
RELATED: Couple devotes life to finding people who drown by accident, suicide or something more sinister
Dennis said in 2018 that he grew up on the water and what started as a fishing hobby between the couple, turned into a search and recovery of several bodies under the water.
The couple used sonar imaging, or sound waves, to locate people who went missing near Hillsboro Marina on Lake Glenn Shoals.
The couple brought the family of Barbara Higgins -- during her missing persons case in November of 2017 -- closure and relief.
They searched from Alton all the way up to Elsberry. Then, they found Higgins’ car in a canal right off of the Mississippi River, her body still inside.
They served several other families and asked for nothing in return. They have been to Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and several other states.
Tammy said she will continue to look for missing persons, but it won't be the same.
"I'll try to make him proud," Tammy said.
Dennis’ wishes were to be cremated and at a later date the family will have a celebration of life on their residential property.
The family is currently waiting on St. Louis County to release Dennis' death records so they can move forward with the cremation and celebration.
"The amount of people that are affected by his death is unreal," Tammy said. "I had no idea the affect we actually had on people."
Tammy said his doctors had already taken out his bladder, kidneys and anything that belonged to his renal system was gone.
“They took it out because of the cancer,” she said.
Tammy said the circumstances around his passing involved doing dialysis at the hospital where he received care.
“The week before he went into the hospital, he had just done training to do the dialysis at home, so we could actually still travel,” Tammy said.
On Sunday night, Oct. 9, he complained that his chest hurt and so Tammy said she made him go to the emergency room.
Tammy said it was known that he had fluid around his lungs because without kidneys, his body could not properly remove fluid on its own.
“We knew that he still had some fluid that was built up around his lungs that they still had to get out, but they hadn’t made an appointment to do that,” Tammy said.
The doctors were going to do dialysis and thoracentesis, which is a procedure to remove fluid or air from around the lungs, she said.
“Before they could do that…he started complaining about his shoulder-blades hurting really bad…so it was muscle strain or dehydration from having to pull the fluid off,” Tammy said. “They gave him pain medication to try to help it.”
“Apparently, after I left that night, it had gotten worse and luckily there was a nurse in the room because he coded and just never came back,” Tammy said. “He never became responsive to pain stimuli or to our voices.”
Tammy said early Tuesday morning on Oct. 11, he experienced cardiac arrest and had an anoxic brain injury, which is caused by the lack of oxygen to the brain.
“He had brain activity, but it had slowed,” she said.
She said Dennis had to go on the ventilator until Saturday afternoon on Oct. 22.
Tammy also said no kidneys meant his body was not able to secrete the sedation used to manage his injury and with his brain not processing it fast enough, the doctors gave Dennis some time to recover.
“He wouldn’t have wanted to live like that,” Tammy said. “So, it was time to say...he has gone through enough,” she said.
She also said Dennis had prostate cancer in 2007, then bladder cancer showed up in 2012, and a few years later cancer spread to both of his kidneys.
“He was given the choice of either having everything taken out and be put on dialysis to live a few more extra years or let the cancer just take its course and just go through his whole body…maybe live a couple of years, but uncomfortable,” she said.
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