MARIETTA, Ga. — A Cobb County mother is desperate for answers after she says her son mysteriously died while working for the U.S. government in Germany.
Desmond Crutchfield, 31, was working as a contractor for the U.S. Army installing fiber optics technology at a base in Germany.
“He said that he’d be returning estimated time of about five to six weeks stay,” his mother Carolyn Gilreath told Channel 2′s Justin Carter.
She says he sent her a text message on Mother’s Day to let her know that he made it safely. He also posted a video on Facebook showing off the views from his Munich hotel room.
Gilreath said days went by and she didn’t hear from her son. She called and sent text messages, but her son had gone silent.
“It was very unusual for me to not get a response,” she explained.
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On May 24, just 11 days after her son left Marietta, Gilreath got a knock on her door that no parent ever wants to receive.
“Two officers came with a notification, a piece of paper, indicating that they had some news for me and I needed to contact the United States Consulate,” Gilreath said.
They told her that her son was dead. Authorities in Germany say he accidentally fell five stories out of his hotel window.
“By the time he got here from Germany, he was already severely decomposed to the point that I had to briefly view his body to say that it was him,” she described.
Crutchfield’s body had not been embalmed. Gilreath says her son was unrecognizable.
“They just decided to send him on a 17-hour flight to Atlanta where he decomposed even more,” she said. “His head had frontal lobe injury trauma, the left side jaw was three to four inches swollen.”
She said the only way she could identify him was by the turtle necklace he was wearing.
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Gilreath attempted to get an official report from German officials but was denied.
“[They] said it was for Germany investigations officials only,” she recalled.
A spokesperson released a statement on Wednesday that read:
“When a U.S. citizen dies abroad, the department provides all appropriate consular assistance to the family and friends. Depending on the situation, this can include attempting to locate and inform next of kin of the death, providing information on local burial or the return of the remains to the United States...Out of respect for the privacy of the family, we have no further comment.”
— U.S. Department of State spokesperson
“You don’t treat a human being that way and at the end of the day, he is my baby and I’ll never see him again,” Gilreath said. “I just pray that God will reveal to me what really caused his death.”
Gilreath has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help offset her son’s burial costs.
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