San Diego police officers and fire-rescue crews swarmed the 5800 block of Mission Gorge Road near Fairmount Avenue and Mission Gorge Place Tuesday afternoon after someone reported seeing a body floating in the San Diego River. Police confirmed a person was found face down in the water, but no other details — including identity or cause of death — have been released.
The call came in around 1:11 p.m., according to 10News, prompting a joint response from San Diego police and fire-rescue department crews. Lifeguards were dispatched to the scene specifically to assist in reaching the body, a detail consistent with City of San Diego Department Procedure 8.18, which generally bars officers from entering the water for recoveries unless there is an immediate threat to life, leaving in-water operations to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department's Lifeguard Division.
That division's Swiftwater Rescue Team, established in 1978, relies on specialized inflatable boats and thermal dry suits for exactly this kind of hazardous riverbed retrieval, gear recently updated through a $70,000 San Diego River Conservancy grant, according to CBS 8. The person's identity, cause, and manner of death remain undetermined.
A Stretch of River With a History of Recoveries
The discovery site sits where light industrial and commercial properties give way to the confluence of Alvarado Creek and the San Diego River, according to the OB Rag. It is not the first time this general stretch of the river has drawn a police response. In July 2019, homicide detectives investigated a suspicious death in Grantville after a passerby reported a partially submerged body near 4200 Camino Del Rio North, per the Times of San Diego.
Nearby, closer to the intersection of Mission Gorge Road and Jackson Drive, a 21-year-old runner drowned in the river in January 2021, an incident KPBS described as illustrating recurring safety hazards along the corridor. And in February 2024, police and lifeguards retrieved two bodies from a flooded riverbed elsewhere in San Diego, where heavy vegetation and debris complicated both the recovery and the postmortem examinations that followed, per CBS News 8's earlier reporting.
An Urbanized Corridor Under Pressure
The area has changed considerably in recent years. The City of San Diego's Grantville Focused Plan Amendment, adopted in 2015, pushed transit-oriented development along Mission Gorge Road, adding high-density housing and commercial foot traffic close to the riverbank. The San Diego River Park Foundation also coordinates ongoing outreach and flood-safety notifications for unhoused residents living in low-lying encampments throughout the watershed.
Law enforcement activity along the broader San Diego River corridor has not been limited to water recoveries. Hoodline reported that a transient man died after officers fired shots during an August standoff in Point Loma Heights, while its account of a June 30 standoff near the San Diego River in Mission Valley said a suspect was taken into custody. As of Tuesday afternoon, the identity of the person found in the Grantville stretch of the river, along with the cause and manner of death, remained undetermined pending the Medical Examiner's investigation.
