In Quest for Selfie, Hiker Instead Meets a Tragic Fate

A 21-year-old man died this week when he tried to snap a selfie from a mountain peak in Arizona and fell 700 feet. The Pinal County Sheriff's Office received a call just before 1am Monday from a friend of the man, who'd been camping overnight in the area of Flatiron Peak at Lost Dutchman State Park, part of the Superstition Mountains just east of Phoenix. The man, identified as Richard Jacobson, "went to go take a photograph with himself and the city skyline in the background, and he lost his footing, and he slipped, and he fell," Sgt. Doug Peoble said, per AZ Family.

Jacobson's body was recovered from a trail 700 below the campsite, while his friend was airlifted out of the area. "As you can imagine, [the friend] was very distraught. He was torn up pretty bad emotionally," Peoble said, per KSAZ. Peoble added that an investigation turned up no signs of foul play or drug use: "It was just a very tragic accident." The area was apparently known to Jacobson. His childhood best friend tells KNXV that the pair had frequently hiked there before. "He was an outdoorsman, hunter, hiker," another friend tells AZ Family. "So I guess he did die doing what he loved to do, just in a tragic way." (More hiker death stories.)