A Hiker Died With a Bullet in His Chest. Why Did Police Say He Was Stabbed by a Stick?

LEWIS COUNTY, Wash.—Wendy Tanner was hiking with her husband in the Cascade Mountains when she saw a burly, bearded man lying beside the trail. She called out, but he didn’t respond. As she drew closer, she said, she saw a wound in his rib cage and a dead puppy lying next to him. “Oh, my God, is somebody shooting hikers?” Tanner asked her husband.

But the first deputy from the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office on the scene on Aug. 20 of last year assured her that the man hadn’t been shot, Tanner recalled. He said the man, later identified as Aron Christensen, had probably fallen on a stick or had a heart attack. Corey Christensen, a music teacher from outside Salem, Ore., said he got news of his brother’s death the next day. Overcome by shock and grief, he scribbled notes so he would be able to remember when he told his parents. “We believe it’s from a massive heart attack,” the woman from the coroner’s office told him. “It doesn’t seem suspicious.”

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Ten months later, authorities haven’t filed charges against anyone, even though a man admitted to shooting a gun nearby that matched the bullet found in Aron Christensen’s chest. Local prosecutors have said they can’t proceed, citing a botched investigation that began with the deputy overlooking the gunshot wound and ended with a veterinarian accusing officials of tampering with the corpse of Buzzo, Aron Christensen’s four month-old Australian Cattle Dog.

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The day after Aron Christensen’s body was found, Michael Asbach phoned the Lewis County Sheriff’s department to say that his son, Ethan Asbach, had shot a dog near Walupt Lake and found a man’s body with a bullet in it, according to an official report. .. Asbach said he didn’t try to call 911, even once he got back within cell range. “I was just thinking about all the trouble that I’m getting everybody else into and not just myself, like, I am completely at fault,” he told the deputy, according to the transcript. “I pulled the trigger, I did that, I’m responsible, but (sniff) it was my dad’s gun.”

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