Tyler Rich was left badly shaken after discovering a dead body while jogging on New Year’s Eve.
The country singer took to social media on Friday (Jan. 1) to recall the horrific experience of finding the young man’s lifeless body while running through a Massachusetts park, and thanked first responders and military officials who face similar situations on a regular basis.
“Not the way I planned on closing out 2020… I guess my last day of the year made sense. My heart breaks for this poor young man,” Rich captioned a screenshot from a news story on Instagram.
“This will be an image and moment of my life, I’ll never forget… I need to shoutout first responders and our military that look death in the eye every day, and are able to continue to live their everyday lives.”
In his post, Rich gives a detailed recollection of spotting the corpse while jogging through a heavily wooded area in Chicopee Memorial State Park. At first glance, the singer thought it was a sleeping homeless man, but after circling back he discovered something much more grim.
“I realize he isn’t breathing, and as I get around to the front of him, all I see is a lifeless face covered in blood. Everywhere,” Rich wrote. “Looked like maybe shot, or blunt force. At this moment, I freak out and sprint up the steep hill to try and find anyone with a phone to call police.”
The singer, who didn’t have a phone on him, quickly found a couple nearby who let him use their mobile device to call police. He then spent the next couple hours giving his statement to authorities.
Rich added that police found “found a gun in one of his hands under his body, which means it potentially could have been a suicide.” Authorities are still investigating the death.
“I’m doing what I can to process this, the image, the reality. It’s been a rough 24 hours,” the singer wrote. “Something I’ll never unsee or forget … He looked like a young, normal kid. Someone with a family probably wondering where he was.”
See more posts from Rich below.
