A tragic whodunit is unfolding in California, where the mysterious deaths of a young family out for a hike in the Sierra National Forest have investigators scrambling for answers.
The bodies of Jonathan Gerrish, 45, his wife, Ellen Chung, 31, their 1-year-old daughter Muji and their pet pooch were discovered this week without any apparent signs of trauma or obvious cause of death, on a trail in an area known as Devil’s Gulch.
With no clues pointing to what killed the family, authorities have opened a murder probe.
“I’ve never seen a death-related case like this,” Mariposa County Sheriff Jeremy Briese told The Fresno Bee. “There are no obvious indicators as to how it occurred.”
“You have two healthy adults, you have a healthy child and what appears to be a healthy canine all within a general same area,” the sheriff added.
Autopsies conducted Thursday didn’t clarify what killed the family, Fox News reported.
By Saturday, authorities said they no longer believed someone else had caused the family’s deaths, with a police spokeswoman telling Fox, “Now that we’re five days in, no, we’re no longer considering homicide as a cause of death.”
Gerrish is a British citizen from Lancashire who worked for Google and Snapchat, according to The Sun. The family had recently moved from San Francisco to Mariposa for a quieter life for their daughter, the outlet reported.
Cops have considered a range of possible culprits in the family’s deaths, including the possibility that they were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide leaking from an old mine shaft.
But, Sheriff Briese told reporters, “We have not found any old mine shafts near the area.”
The sheriff floated another theory in a TV interview, that the family succumbed to toxins emitted by an algae bloom from nearby waters.
California officials are testing the nearby waters for the presence of algae-born toxins, while police await the results of toxicology reports on the victims.
Those results “can take up to six weeks, sometimes even longer,” sheriff’s spokesperson Kristie Mitchell told The Bee.
“Unfortunately we don’t have a great time frame for that yet.”
Until then the mystery remains.
“I think it’s going to be a very long and in depth, thorough investigation because it isn’t as clear cut as what some cases are,” said Mitchell.