An safety investigation into the untimely death of Craig Lehner, the Buffalo Police Lieutenant who never resurfaced during a training exercise in the Niagara River in October 2017, found four violations designated as serious.

Lehner was 34 years old, also a K9 officer, and still mourned across the region.

The department held a press conference Saturday after obtaining the Public Employee Safety and Health report, which noted that police dive teams have to comply with the commercial diving standards that are used in the private sector.

In the report were four violations deemed as serious and one as non-serious. A police spokesman said that a "substantial" number of the violations were related to paperwork, record keeping, documentation, and procedural related to training in the river.

The violations listed in the report: 

• Underwater rescue and recovery divers were not equipped with a diver-carried reserve of breathing gas supplies.

• The Buffalo Police did not properly assess all safety and health aspects of the training dive that day.

• The BPD's Safe Practices Manual did not include safety and equipment procedures or checklists, assignments and responsibilities of dive team members and emergency procedures for fire, equipment failure or mental illness or injury.

• Not all dive team members had experience or training in diving operations and emergency procedures.

• And dive logs did not include time entries, diving mides or describe visibility and current conditions.

In the report, PESH also found no standards for Police Department Dive Teams.

Read the report