It was a tragic freak accident, police in California say
A massive block of snow fell from a roof and buried a mother and her 7-year-old son just feet from the front door of their Northern California mountain condo, authorities say. Olga Perkovic and her son Aaron Goodstein had been skiing in the Sierra Nevada near the Nevada state line, the Alpine County Sheriff's Department says. They were returning home Sunday when a chunk about the size of a trailer fell from the roof, burying them under about 3 feet of snow. "It was a freak accident," Undersheriff Spencer Pace tells the AP . He says warming temperatures often cause snow to slide off roofs, occasionally injuring people. But he said neither he nor the sheriff can recall sliding snow ever killing anyone in the three decades they've been there.
Pace said Perkovic's mother, who was staying in the condo with the family of five, reported the pair missing at about 6:40pm Sunday. Rescuers searched the nearby Kirkwood Ski Resort for hours because the pair's last known location was a ski lift where they had scanned their tickets at about 4pm. Pace said it appears the two skied an "alternate" route home from the slopes that took them between buildings on a path that is unpaved in the summer. At about 9pm, a neighbor spotted ski gloves next to the condo, realized they were beneath the snow and called 911. The mother, 50, and son from San Francisco were airlifted to a hospital, where they were declared dead, Pace says.
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