Alphonse “Mike” Barbiere, whose remains were found nearly two months after he walked away from a Breckenridge bar, did not test positive for drugs or alcohol in his blood and died of hypothermia, according to the Summit County coroner.
Indications are that the New Jersey man, 23, became disoriented in a blizzard and laid down and went to sleep, said coroner Joanne Richardson.
The coroner said Barbiere’s urine showed an alcohol level of .110, which means he metabolized the alcohol he drank over a few hours.
Barbiere left a Main Street bar wearing a light jacket. Search and rescue teams, along with volunteers, could not find him.
Rescuers estimated that dressed the way he was, he would have become hypothermic within 40 minutes, said Assistant Police Chief Greg Morrison.
When Barbiere left Cecilia’s Martini Bar at 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 8, a friend saw him going toward the center of town instead of west, where he was renting a condo with his family at Trails End Condominiums, according to his brother.
“We were searching for him on the opposite end of town,” said Bob Barbiere, 46.
Barbiere apparently collapsed as he walked across a field toward the lights outside a closed skating rink. By the time he fell, his body temperature could have dropped to the point that he was hallucinating, Morrison has said.
A Denver man who operates a ski lift at Vail resort found Barbiere’s credit card April 5, close to where the body was buried under snow and ice.
The lift operator told police he had been looking for the body for several days in hopes of collecting a $10,000 reward offered by the family.
