By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
A divided Colorado Court of Appeals panel Thursday upheld the Pitkin County sheriff’s denial of records concerning the death of a 78-year-old hiker on the Conundrum Creek Trail near Aspen in 2024.
EWU Media, a Nevada production company that makes true crime documentaries, claimed in a lawsuit that sheriff’s office records custodian Charlie Matthews incorrectly applied an at-risk adult statute to withhold the records under the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act.
A Pitkin County District Court judge found last year that Matthews “properly denied” EWU Media’s request because C.R.S. § 26-3.1-102(7)(a) protects “reports of the mistreatment or self-neglect of an at-risk adult.” The 2-1 appellate opinion, written by Judge Grant Sullivan, confirmed the ruling.
“[W]e agree with the district court that the custodian didn’t abuse his discretion by determining that the statute prohibits disclosure of the sheriff’s investigation records related to the death of an elderly hiker with dementia symptoms who departed on a trail without water or adequate clothing,” it says.
Deputies found the deceased hiker on the 8.5-mile trail in the White River National Forest in October 2024 after receiving reports of a missing person. According to a brief submitted by the county, the sheriff’s office treated the investigation as one involving an at-risk adult based on reports from the hiker’s friend and sister about his age, physical condition and “pre-dementia.”
“EWU Media requested newsworthy records related to a hiker dying on a popular trail,” an attorney for the production company wrote in an appellate brief. The death, he argued, “was attributable to physical circumstances and/or natural causes, not neglect or abuse.” No evidence was presented at trial that the hiker had been diagnosed with, or exhibited symptoms of, pre-dementia, he added. “… The decedent made a deliberate and pre-mediated decision to go hiking, responsibly communicating his plans to a close friend before leaving on his hike.”
Under CCJRA, records can be withheld if “inspection would be contrary to any state statute.”
“Self-neglect” under the at-risk adult statute means “an act or failure to act whereby an at-risk adult substantially endangers his or her health, safety, welfare, or life by not seeking or obtaining services necessary to meet his or her essential human needs.”
“While departing on a hike underprepared wouldn’t suffice by itself, when coupled with the evidence of the hiker’s dementia symptoms and his previous experience on this trail, the custodian could have reasonably concluded that the hiker’s combined actions had substantially endangered his health, safety, welfare, or life,” Sullivan wrote in the unpublished (non-precedential) opinion. As for the statutory requirement that the hiker must have failed to seek or obtain services to meet his essential human needs, “this includes but isn’t limited to the provision of life-sustaining goods such as food, water, and clothing, whether from oneself or a third party,” the judge added.
In a dissenting opinion, Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Jones wrote that Matthews “failed to prove that the hiker engaged in self-neglect” as that term is defined in the statute.
“When a person brings water and dresses for an excursion outside the home, is that person obtaining a service by doing so? I think to ask the question is to answer it ‘no.’ Water is a thing. Clothing is a thing. (And in this case, both are things the hiker had available to him in his home.) Neither thing is a ‘service’ within the commonly understood meaning of the term,” Jones concluded.
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