A grieving Los Angeles family says they had to launch their own desperate search for their beloved 83-year-old grandfather who vanished at Hansen Dam — only to find him dead in the lake three days later —no thanks to police.

Ramiro Herrera disappeared while visiting the Hansen Dam Recreation Area in Lake View Terrace.

His family told the San Fernando Valley Sun that they organized their own daily search parties, starting with about 15 people on the first day and swelling to nearly 100 by the third.

Authorities, they said, provided little assistance.

Then, three days after Herrera disappeared, a volunteer searching with the family found his body in Hansen Dam Lake.

The preliminary cause of death was accidental drowning.

Herrera’s stepdaughter, Gabby Conde of Chatsworth, said the family had been forced to take matters into their own hands as the search dragged on.

“My mom thought the police were going to do more. She told me, ‘I can’t believe we’re the ones who found him,’” Conde told the Valley Sun. “We’re all really disappointed that we didn’t get the help that we needed from the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]. If we had, maybe things would have turned out differently.”

The grieving family is now planning a funeral in Monterey Park, close to the couple’s East LA home, but they’re also left with questions about whether additional measures by police could have changed anything.

“On that first day, I asked them, ‘Well, can you send out [search] dogs? Maybe if the dogs can pick up his scent, they can find him,’” Conde told the newspaper. She said they told her that wasn’t an option to use a K-9 unit for the search because “they didn’t have the financial resources.”

Herrera went missing after he decided to take a walk around 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 9.

When Herrera didn’t return by 3 p.m., his wife, Rosa Ohm, knew something was wrong.

That’s when the family reached out to LAPD and filed a missing person report.

LAPD officers and park rangers then conducted a search around Hansen Dam Park, but according to Conde, it lasted just “about five minutes.”

Meanwhile, Herrera’s relatives and friends looked for him from the afternoon until 1 a.m.

“Within three hours of [arriving], the officers left us,” Ohm told the news outlet. “And the park rangers kept telling us that [my husband] wasn’t in the park – that they had already done a thorough search.”

“I even asked, ‘Are you leaving us here alone to fend for ourselves in this situation?’’ added Conde. “And they replied, ‘No, we’re going to leave, but we’ll look around to see if he’s on the streets somewhere.’”

The family later made and handed out hundreds of missing person flyers on the second day Herrera was missing and posted information online. They received calls from two possible eyewitnesses, both of whom said they had seen someone who looked like Herrera by the lake and that he appeared to be injured.

Their accounts were similar to a tip Conde’s son received the previous day from a homeless man whom Herrera had apparently asked to help find his wife after suffering a head injury.

The homeless man didn’t find Ohm, but he did report the incident to a park ranger, who later followed him to look for Herrera but was unable to locate him.

The family then requested additional searches, but Conde said park rangers told her they had already searched around the lake and hadn’t seen anyone.

“I felt like they just didn’t care,” she said about both the park rangers and LAPD officers. “One of the officers said, ‘We looked for him in [local] liquor stores.’ But my dad didn’t even drink!”

“He was such a sweet man,” continued Conde. “He was always really respectful and a man of his home. He loved his home and he also loved the outdoors. I told my mom, it’s such [painful] irony that he passed away that way, in the outdoors, in nature, which he always loved so much.”

LAPD did put out missing person and “silver” alerts for Herrera.

But the timeline of those alerts is unclear, according to previous reporting.

Conde said the family is considering asking for an investigation into whether park rangers and officers followed established protocols during the search.

Herrera’s family is also waiting for his full autopsy results.

The California Post reached out to LAPD and park rangers for request for comment on whether enough was done to find Herrera, but did not hear back immediately.