Boulders lifted off bodies

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Local police, firemen and city work crews, with the help of a local towing company, removed three bodies from an hillside north of Rio West Mall Tuesday.

The bodies — one female and two males -— were removed after crews took care of one 12-foot boulder and several medium-size rocks that had fallen on them from higher up on the hill several days before they were discovered late Monday.

Lt. Rick White of the Gallup Police Department said three sets of identification were also recovered with the bodies, and these have been turned over to the coroner’s office as well as fingerprint cards from the police department. Visual identification was not possible because of the conditions of the bodies.

White said he is hoping to have the identities of the three — all of whom were possibly part of the local homeless community — confirmed by 2 p.m. Wednesday.

The theory is still that the three were living or resting in the hills during Friday’s rainstorm when rocks from higher up on the hill broke loose.

“I’m sure that death came fairly quickly,” White said, “but we won’t know for sure until the autopsy is done.”

Police received the call about the bodies just before 6 p.m. Monday. By the time police had investigated, it had begun raining and getting dark, so the decision was made to leave police officers at the scene to secure the area during the night and resume rescue operations in the morning.

Stan Henderson, head of the city’s engineering department, said the plans were originally to bring in a city crew to try and move the rocks Wednesday morning, but instead the city brought in a crew from A-1 Towing. The work needed equipment that the company possessed for use in excavations.

Beginning at 8 a.m., the workers were able to recover one of the bodies by moving some of the smaller boulders and then using the tow truck to move the bigger boulder that was over the other two bodies. The last of the bodies had been removed by 11 a.m.

Henderson said crews placed sandbags on the bodies so that they would not be damaged as the rocks were taken off.
“We had no problems,” he said, adding that the city would have had to come up with a different rescue strategy if any of the victims had still been alive.

Dave Steadman, who works for A-1, estimated that the bigger boulder weighed about 25 tons, since his equipment is built to handle that big a load and the truck was straining at times to move the rock.