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 to 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 friend, when he stumbled out of Cecilia’s Martini Bar on Main Street at South Park Avenue at about 1:30 a.m. Friday. He had begun drinking heavily that night, 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, with visability at about 3 or 4 feet, in the opposite direction of his rented condo a few blocks away, Morrison said.
“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 staggered out into the storm.
The men are not considered suspects in the disapparance, but searchers hope Barbiere might have said something to them about where he planned to go that night.
Barbiere wasn’t carrying a lot of cash, and the idea that he might have been taken very far from Breckenridge that night is also remote.
“The county was shut down that night” because of the weather, Morrison said.
Friends told police about another time back East when Barbiere got drunk and slept it off in a stranger’s car he found unlocked.
Barbiere’s friends have distributed fliers with his picture in bars and restaurants around town. 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.
Dogs, including an avalanche dog from the Vail Mountain Rescue Group, aided in the search.
Coleen Barbiere, the missing man’s sister-in-law, said in an e-mail that he arrived in Breckenridge with five of his friends, and two of their fathers, last Wednesday.
Barbiere, who is self-employed and goes by the name Mike, graduated with honors from New York University.
His family released a statement Sunday saying, “We pray that he is brought home safe.”
The family asked anyone with information to call Breckenridge police at 970-453-3177.
Barbiere is 6 feet tall with brown hair and brown eyes and was last seen wearing a black and gray ski jacket, jeans and tan boots.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
