Lightning may not have killed a father and son found dead Wednesday in their tent near West Maroon Pass, the Aspen Times reports.
“Lightning may have been a premature guess,” Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvot told the newspaper Thursday.
If the two had died of a lightning strike, “we would have heard that instantly” from the coroner, DiSalvo said. Toxicology tests will be able to tell, for example, if they died of poisoning or another cause that wouldn’t be obvious in a standard autopsy, he said.
The Pitkin County Coroner’s Office on Thursday identified the two people who were found dead in their tent Wednesday at a camping site near Aspen as Jeffery Beard, 41, and Cameron Beard, 14, both of Colorado Springs.
They were found by hikers at the Maroon Bells campsite.
Two other children — an older daughter, about 12 years old, and a younger son, about 8 or 9 years old — were sleeping in a nearby tent. They were later spotted in a parking lot near the campsite.