FILE – People ride the Giant Canyon Swing at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park in Glenwood Springs, Colo., June 10, 2011. A heavily armed man killed himself rather than carry out an apparent plan to shoot up the mountaintop amusement park in Colorado, authorities said Monday, Oct. 30, 2023.
A Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park maintenance worker can be heard in the Saturday morning call calmly telling a dispatcher that the body was surrounded by weapons and alcohol in the women’s bathroom at a ride called the Crystal Tower.
A message saying, “I am not a killer, I just wanted to get into the caves,” was written on the wall of the bathroom where Diego Barajas Medina’s body was found, Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario said earlier this week. headtopics.com
No evidence has been released by authorities detailing exactly what the 20-year-old man had planned when he entered the park via a private service road in the hours before it opened over the weekend. Medina had no known prior criminal history, according to authorities.
Police in nearby Carbondale said they had made no service calls to an apartment where public records show Medina lived. He had taken classes at Colorado Mountain College as a high school student and expressed a plan to enroll at the college but never did, according to the college.The amusement park is surrounded by state-owned public land on a mountain above the Colorado River in western Colorado. headtopics.com
Park representatives said in a Monday statement that Glenwood Caverns has an extensive network of fencing, gates, security cameras and alarms to protect rides, ride-restricted areas and sensitive buildings. The park said “the incident on October 28 did not take place in any of these areas and was not related to any rides or attractions.”