FRIENDS of a Massachusetts woman are now demanding answers after she was found dead following a hike with an off-duty cop.
Angela Tramonte, 31, went hiking on the Echo Canyon Trail in Arizona on Friday with Dario Dizdar of the Phoenix Police Department, less than 24 hours after she had arrived in the area for a first visit with him after speaking online for two months.
He claimed Tramonte became overheated halfway up the trail and wanted to turn around, but he continued the hike on his own, according to authorities.
Rescue crews went looking for the young woman, but four hours later, her body was found around 4:40pm that afternoon near a home.
Firefighters think she was trying to alert someone in the area that she was struggling before she collapsed, according to ABC15.
Friends of Tramonte in the Boston, Massachusetts, area say they now "want answers."
“As a cop, as a first responder, you’re supposed to help people. If somebody’s walking up a mountain and you’re seeing her in distress and she’s not feeling well and she’s exhausted – why wouldn’t you walk her back down,” Stacey Gerardi told WBZ.
“Why would you continue to walk back up? It doesn’t make sense.”
A spokeswoman for the Phoenix Police Department, Mercedes Fortune, told the Daily Mail that no “traumatic injuries” were seen on Tramonte when she was found or during the autopsy, and that there is “no evidence to indicate foul play is suspected in connection with Ms. Tramonte’s tragic death.”
“We want justice. We want answers,” Gerardi said.
“We need to keep pushing. That was my sister. We had 25 years of friendship.”
“It's hard to imagine she went out there, wearing the [improper] shoes, and with no water,” another friend, Evelyn Doherty Trefry, told NBC Boston.
“That's just completely out of character for her.”
“'We just want justice for our friend,” a GoFundMe page raising money to transport Tramonte's body to Saugus and for her funeral expenses reads.
Tramonte was in the area visiting Dizdar from Saugus after the two spoke on Instagram for two months.
The pair started the hike together, but Dizdar continued on after Tramonte turned back.
When he got back to the parking lot after the hike, Tramonte wasn’t there, so Dizdar called to report her missing.
When she was found just hours later, she was “unresponsive, beyond resuscitative efforts and was pronounced deceased,” Daily Mail cited from authorities.
Neither had water with them and Phoenix fire Captain Rob McDade told the Boston Globe of where Tramonte was found, “[she] could have conceivably been in the early stages of heat exhaustion and heatstroke, where you become delirious, and unfortunately, your faculties are not about you.”
No charges have been made in connection with her death.
“This mountain doesn't care who you are, or how great of a hiker or an experienced hiker you are,” McDade said of the mountain the trail was on.
“The mountain, in a situation like that, usually wins.”
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