Florida police are dredging dozens of cars from a Doral lake and are still figuring out how and why the vehicles wound up there

The Miami-Dade police department is hauling dozens of cars out of a lake in the county.

Miami-Dade Police Department

• Divers say they found 32 cars in a Florida lake while following leads in decades-old cold cases.
• On Tuesday, the Miami-Dade police department started hauling up cars from the bottom of the lake. 
• A Miami-Dade PD spokesperson says at least one of the cars is a stolen vehicle.

Florida police are pulling dozens of cars from a muddy lake in Doral, and they haven't figured out why — or how — the vehicles ended up there in the first place. 

The Miami-Dade Police Department started hauling cars out of a lake in the county on Tuesday morning, per USA Today. At least three vehicles have been recovered, including an Acura Legend, a Ford Econoline 3500, and a Cadillac Sedan DeVille. 

Alvaro Zabaleta, a spokesperson for the Miami-Dade Police Department, told WFLA there are "several dozen" more cars to haul out from the water. Most of the cars in the lake are "very old vehicles," per Zabaleta, and some were likely stolen. 

"These are most likely the type of vehicles we're going to find in this lake," Zabaleta told WFLA. "Vehicles that perhaps have been abandoned and they wanted to get rid of them, and they got rid of them here, or those that took them for a joy ride, they were stolen and then they were dumped inside the lake."

Zabaleta told USA Today that detectives are also looking for evidence linked to cold cases. 

"We're not gonna discard the possibility of some type of fraud that also can occur and some other type of foul play like a homicide," Zabaleta told USA Today. 

A team of divers working for a private company discovered the cars, per Miami television station WSVN 7News. Ken Fleming, one of the divers, told 7News that his team has been following the trail on multiple cold cases, some involving people who have been missing for three to four decades. 

One case involved a person who disappeared when driving to the airport from Pinellas County. This lead brought the divers to a lake near Northwest 87th Avenue and 13th Terrace, per 7News.

Videos obtained by 7News showed the divers swimming through murky water and finding multiple cars rotting at the bottom of the lake. 

"When we discover a spot like this with multiple vehicles, it pretty much indicates that a crime where they're disposing the vehicles and hiding them from law enforcement," Fleming told 7News. 

"In this spot, we're near the airport, it's a large body of water, it has easy access to get into, so we would target that as a potential foul play spot," Fleming added.