What you should know
- Teams searching for a missing man in Grand Canyon National Park made an unexpected discovery this summer.
- It’s that search teams found the remains of another person, believed to be Scott Walsh, who was last seen getting off a shuttle bus at the park’s South Rim in 2015.
- The clothing had blended into the surroundings and the body was positioned in a way that made it undetectable, said park spokeswoman Joelle Baird.
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ARIZONA – Teams searching for a missing man in Grand Canyon National Park made an unexpected discovery this summer.
It’s that search teams found the remains of another person, believed to be Scott Walsh, who was last seen getting off a shuttle bus at the park’s South Rim in 2015. The clothing had mixed with the surroundings and the body was positioned in a way that made it undetectable, park spokeswoman Joelle Baird said.
“It happens from time to time here, during searches, that we end up finding people we didn’t expect,” he said Wednesday.
The teams had been searching for Gabor Berczi-Tomscanyi, a Hungarian national living in Hong Kong. He was reported missing to police in Las Vegas in late July while traveling through the southwestern United States. The car he was driving was located in a Grand Canyon parking lot in mid-August and his body was found a few days later, about 430 feet below the canyon rim at Yavapai Point.
Authorities determined that Berczi-Tomscanyi died from a traumatic fall, but are still investigating what caused it.
The other body was seen during an aerial search of Berczi-Tomscanyi. It was found about 600 feet below the Pipe Creek lookout and about 3 miles from where Walsh’s backpack was found in 2015, Baird said.
“The fact that they found him was a coincidence,” he said. “We weren’t necessarily looking for him, and he wasn’t really on our radar.”
Walsh was not reported to the park as missing in 2015. His last known residence was in Ecuador. Park officials believe it’s him because the backpack had prescriptions with his name on it and a jacket found with the remains had a driver’s license issued to Walsh of Brooklyn, New York, Baird said. He was 56 years old.
The park has not been able to locate any immediate family members, but has spoken with friends of Walsh, Baird said.
The Coconino County Medical Examiner’s Office is working to confirm the identity of the skeletal remains. County spokeswoman Trish Lees said that could require DNA testing.
Unintended finds don’t happen often in Grand Canyon National Park, which covers 1,904 square miles. The park is larger than the state of Rhode Island.
Rangers conducting scheduled trainings have found human remains months and years after their disappearances were reported. Sometimes rafters from the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon encounter them.
In December 2017, rafters on a day hike found the remains of a California man who was last seen on a trail in June of that year.
In 2015, a group of rafters searching for old mining equipment on a hike through the canyon came across the wreckage of a small aircraft with human bones scattered nearby.
Investigators had long suspected that the home-built plane was flown by Joseph Radford of Glendale, Arizona, and crashed into the canyon in March 2011, probably on purpose, according to a report from the National Transportation Safety Board. . But until the discovery of the beams, there were no visual signs of the crash site.
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