Five 17-year-old boys from Grand Junction were killed Sunday morning when the vehicle they were in went off a cliff and crashed into a hillside on Lookout Lane. By Monday afternoon, the Mesa County Coroner’s Office had finished its examination and said all five died from injuries suffered in the crash.
The Grand Junction Police Department said first responders were dispatched to the 2000 block of Lookout Lane at 7:45 a.m. after a report of a vehicle that had driven off the edge of a cliff. When crews reached the scene, all five people inside were dead. Personnel from Grand Junction Police Department, Mesa County Search and Rescue, Grand Junction Fire Department, and the Mesa County Coroner’s Office recovered the bodies from the crash site.
The coroner’s office said it will not publicly identify the boys because they were minors, and their names will be released only after next-of-kin have been notified. That leaves the crash defined by the facts investigators can see, not the names they cannot yet share: three of the boys were wearing seatbelts, including the driver and front seat passenger, while two were not and were thrown from the car.
Grand Junction Police Department said its initial investigation found the vehicle was traveling southbound on Lookout Lane when it veered off the roadway and down the steep incline of the hillside. Speed is being looked at as a factor, but investigators have not said what caused the loss of control in the first place. The incident remains under investigation, and for now the unanswered question is less about who was inside the car than why it left the road at all.
