Breckenridge authorities suspended the search Sunday night for a commodities trader from New Jersey, after they had looked every place he could have reasonably walked in a blizzard.
“I wanted to emphasize ‘suspended,’ ” said Breckenridge Assistant Police Chief Greg Morrison. “If we get new information or the snow melts a little, we’ll resume looking.”
Alphonse Michael Barbiere, 23, was vacationing with seven family members and friends when he stumbled out of Cecilia’s Martini Bar on Main Street at South Park Avenue about 1:30 a.m. Friday. He had begun drinking heavily that night and had at least 20 drinks, the group told police.
He and one of his companions stopped outside the bar. The friend lit a cigarette, but Barbiere strolled off down the street in the blizzard in the opposite direction of his rented condo a few blocks away, Morrison said. Visibility was about 3 or 4 feet.
“He didn’t say anything to anybody about where he was going,” Morrison said.
Police said Sunday evening that snapshots taken by friends at the bar show Barbiere talking with three unidentified men about two hours before he went out into the storm.
The men are not considered suspects in the disappearance, but searchers hope Barbiere might have said something to them about where he planned to go that night.
Barbiere’s friends have distributed fliers with his picture. Searchers have concentrated on an area around downtown Breckenridge. A dive team lowered cameras into a section of the Blue River where searchers found broken ice. They found nothing, Morrison said.
Barbiere’s family released a statement Sunday saying, “We pray that he is brought home safe.”
The family asks anyone with information to call Breckenridge police at 970-453-3177.
