Extreme heat kills 3 hikers so far during July - TriValley Central
A man and his 12-year-old grandson were found dead last week several miles apart along a desert trail after they went hiking in the remote Maricopa Mountains, and the boy likely died while going for help, authorities said. The bodies of Thomas Gillespie, 63, of Tucson and Robert Miller of Prescott Valley were discovered late Wednesday in the mountains near Gila Bend, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said. Officials are determining a cause of death, but it appeared Gillespie either died of exposure or had a medical emergency, sheriff’s spokesman Chris Hegstrom said. Also on Wednesday, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s search-and-rescue team helped a woman and her ailing father down from a mountain near Fountain Hills. The 25-year-old woman called sheriff’s deputies earlier in the day after the pair had hiked into a rugged portion of the Four Peaks wilderness northeast of the Phoenix area and the man started to have some sort of medical problem. Sheriff’s deputies responded to the area and determined the terrain was too difficult to extract the man and woman on Wednesday night. Searchers found Gillespie’s body about 5 miles from the trailhead in the Sonoran Desert National Monument where their vehicle was parked and the boy’s body about 1. 5 miles from the trailhead, Hegstrom said. The boy had keys to the vehicle but it wasn’t known whether the pair had taken food and water with them, Hegstrom said. Source: www.trivalleycentral.com
