Police are investigating the death of a Park City man who breached security at Salt Lake City International Airport late Monday and climbed inside a passenger plane’s engine cowling.
The 30-year-old man, identified Tuesday as Kyler Efinger, was found unconscious inside the cowling before he was pronounced dead, Salt Lake City police said. His cause of death has not been determined.
According to police, the manager of a store at the airport first contacted the Airport Control Center at about 9:52 p.m. on Monday to report a “disturbance involving a passenger” on the secured side of the terminal. As officers at the airport responded, the store manager reported at about 9:56 p.m. that the man went through one of the terminal’s emergency exit doors.
Efinger was a ticketed passenger with a boarding pass for a Denver flight, police later determined.
[Read more: What we know about the Salt Lake City airport breach that ended with a man dead]
Officers and airport operations employees then began searching for Efinger in the airport’s outdoor ramp area. At about 10:04 p.m., a pilot reported seeing the man, according to a more detailed timeline that police released Tuesday afternoon.
A minute later, responding officers requested that the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control tower be notified of the situation. At 10:06 p.m., officers and airport staff found personal items, including clothing and shoes, on one of the airport’s runways, police said.
At 10:08 p.m., dispatchers relayed to officers that Efinger had been spotted underneath a commercial aircraft and had accessed the plane’s engine, police said. Officers immediately requested that air traffic controllers notify the plane’s pilot to shut down the aircraft’s engines.
Within the same minute, officers arrived to find Efinger partially inside the intake cowling of one of the aircraft’s wing-mounted engines. Police initially said the aircraft’s engines were not running, according to a preliminary investigation, but on Tuesday afternoon, police confirmed the aircraft’s engines were rotating when Efinger was found.
“The specific stage of engine operation remains under investigation,” police said in a news release.
The plane was loaded with passengers at the time but parked atop a deicing pad, police said.
At about 10:09 p.m., officers removed the man from the cowling, secured the scene and began rendering aid to him while requesting emergency medical services. The man received CPR and a dose of naloxone, police said, but he died at the scene.
Salt Lake City police are working with the Utah medical examiner’s office to determine Efinger’s cause and manner of death.
Passengers were taken off the plane where Efinger was found, but the “overall operation” of the airport was not affected, according to police.
Salt Lake City police, the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Security Administration continue to investigate the event.
