‘This school is unsafe:’ complaints to the VA about CDA Technical institute date back to 2019

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In our continuing investigation into a local dive school, Action News Jax uncovered complaints made to the Department of Veterans Affairs dating back to 2019 about CDA Technical Institute.

Several lines in some of the complaints read: “This school is unsafe in every aspect,” " The quality of this school is horrible” and “we literally had one kid that almost died because of their carelessness.”

Through a public records request, we got our hands on 44 pages of documents, totaling seven complaints, dating back to April 2019, in which veterans at the school shared their concerns with recruiting and marketing practices, quality of education, and accreditation.

Former CDA student Mike Musolin said a few of those came from his class. He graduated in September 2020.

“We actually made a list at one point of all the living conditions and the deep water training center and everything. There was quite a bit and my class, if I’m not mistaken, they did do quite a bit of filing complaints,” Musolin said.

Action News Jax has been investigating the dive school for months.

Now we’re learning that claims of unsafe practices, inexperienced instructors, and poor equipment that we’ve recently heard, have been made before.

“There’d be times I got dive hats where the water would be up to my lip and even though I was ventilating and purging, and whatnot, it would still be at my lip,” Musolin said.

A complaint from October 2020 claims the owner of CDA only patches equipment problems instead of fixing things. In 2019, a veteran claimed their courses are not transferable because of accreditation issues.

Something similar happened to Musolin. He said a school in Louisiana could not find a record of the rigging certification he supposedly earned at CDA.

“So, I had to get re-certified again and take that extra time,” Musolin said.

The complaints continued to come through after two student divers died.

A diver filed a complaint on Feb. 23 of this year. This was almost two weeks after Victor Pierce’s initial scuba diving incident. In it, they share concerns about dangerous uncontrolled scuba diving training areas.

Pierce passed away from his injuries five days after this complaint was filed.

Another complaint is dated April 29, weeks after Fausto Martins passed away.

The complainant claims CDA threatened students when media came to the school questioning the two deaths.

From 2019 to the present, students have been alerting the VA and ask for an investigation.

Action News Jax first told you when the VA pulled its GI Bill funding in April.

These complaints are open for a few days at a time to as long as 75 days. However, it’s unclear in these documents what happens as a result.

We reached out to the VA for clarification on what exactly happened with past complaints. We are waiting to hear back.

We reached out to CDA and were told no comment.

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