A person walking on a bike path in the Mendenhall Valley made a grim discovery Thursday morning: A dead body partially submerged in a drainage ditch.<\/p>\n
Juneau Police Department officers identified the deceased as 55-year-old Juneau resident Gary D. Brummitt. Next of kin have been notified.<\/p>\n
JPD spokesman Lt. David Campbell said there were no signs of foul play. Brummitt\u2019s body will be sent to the Medical Examiner\u2019s Office in Anchorage for an autopsy.<\/p>\n
On Thursday afternoon, the Empire observed police remove an overturned wheelchair and what appeared to be a dark-colored backpack found at the site, a ditch next to the bike path that parallels Egan Drive.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone called and said they were walking on the bike path and saw a body,\u201d said another JPD spokesperson, Erann Kalwara, adding the caller didn\u2019t have a cellphone on them, so they walked to Fred Meyer to make a report.<\/p>\n
According to an official statement from JPD, the report reached police at 11:19 a.m.<\/p>\n
In the early afternoon, police and investigators wielded surveying equipment as they documented the scene then removed the wheelchair from a drainage ditch between the bike path and a chain link fence that separates the path from Teslin Street, a dead-end residential road.<\/p>\n
Retiree Benjamin Suson lives in the house closest to the scene of the police investigation.<\/p>\n
He was hanging Christmas lights and said he was unaware what had happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy wife and I didn\u2019t even notice it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
They left their home early in the morning and noticed police when they returned about 11:30 a.m. Their home is separated from the path by a chain-link fence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t hear anything,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The bike path at Loop Road and Egan Drive was closed during the investigation, but all surface streets remained open.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A person walking on a bike path in the Mendenhall Valley made a grim discovery Thursday morning: A dead body partially submerged in a drainage ditch. Juneau Police Department officers identified the deceased as 55-year-old Juneau resident Gary D. Brummitt. Next of kin have been notified. JPD spokesman Lt. David Campbell said there were no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":24434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-24433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24433"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=24433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}