The two elk hunters found dead last week in southern Colorado were killed by lightning, according to the Conejos County coroner.
Andrew Porter, 25, of Asheville, North Carolina, and Ian Stasko, 25, of Salt Lake City, Utah, went missing on a hunting trip near the Colorado-New Mexico border in the Rio Grande National Forest. They were last heard from on Sept. 11 and found dead Thursday, a week later, two miles from the Rio De Los Pinos trailhead.
Both men were killed by lightning, but were not directly struck, Conejos County Coroner Richard Martin said.
“A lightning strike to the ground took them in an instant,” Bridget Murphy, Porter’s fiancée, wrote Monday in an . “They didn’t do anything wrong, they didn’t feel fear or pain.”
Martin said the hunters had no significant injuries or burn marks, which made determining the cause of death difficult. He said lightning most likely struck a tree and continued into the men.
“He was an experienced outdoorsman who was in the wrong spot at the wrong time,” Murphy wrote of Porter. “… But what reassures me is that they were doing what they loved, without fear, well prepared and equipped and this is a bizarre horrific act of nature. It could’ve happened anywhere, to anyone.”
