The Summit County Sheriff’s Office initially believed the two-year-old boy went missing from the Christmas Meadows area.
Sheriff’s spokesperson Skyler Talbot said Sunday the incident originated in the Manor Lands cabin community, which is closer to Evanston than Kamas.
He says the boy’s family, who reported him missing early Saturday, had been camping in a fifth-wheel trailer. Deputies think he left the trailer without the family noticing.
A person found the boy unresponsive one mile downstream from the camper in a drainage or runoff ditch close to Mirror Lake Highway soon after at 11:15 a.m. Investigators are working to determine when he was last seen alive.
“We are fairly early in the investigation. However, at this time, there's nothing to indicate this is more than a tragic accident,” Talbot said June 15. “We are going to be working with the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner, and we hope to have some preliminary results from them as to the cause and manner of death, hopefully in the coming days.”
First responders from Wyoming made first contact with the boy and his family.
Talbot says there was a “large number” of the boy’s family members camping in the area but did not know where they were from. It’s unclear how close to the waterway they were, but he says it was within eyesight and walking distance.
“It's certainly not lost on us that this is Father's Day. This is incredibly tragic,” he said. “There’s a mother who's lost her son; there's a father who's lost his son; and there's a grieving family. We are going to investigate this fully, but right now, our thoughts are with the family during this time.”
There were multiple air ambulances in the area, but Talbot clarified the child was ground transported to a Wyoming hospital. He was then transferred to Salt Lake City, where he was pronounced dead.
A family member of the boy was airlifted to the hospital after the incident. Talbot says they were suffering a separate medical episode but added that it was likely related to or precipitated by the traumatic nature of the child’s death.
