Campground Fatality Appears Accidental Victim’s Father Forgives Friend Who Accidentally Killed His Son

Larry Jenkins was enjoying a quiet evening around the campfire Saturday when two men carrying a rifle wandered onto his campground.

Shivering and shocked, they told Jenkins, a Spokane respiratory therapist, they had just shot their good friend and needed help.

After calming down, Jenkins went to their camp about a mile and a half away only to find Jared Collotzi, 24, already dead from a shotgun wound to the neck.

“It was a scary situation,” Jenkins said Monday, his voice strained from the weekend ordeal. “In the middle of the night, camping, two people walk into your camp smelling like alcohol, carrying a rifle - you don’t know what to do.”

Jenkins spent the next five hours guarding the two men while his wife, a nurse, checked to make sure they didn’t collapse from shock.

It took Shoshone County sheriff’s deputies and rescue workers until 3 a.m. Sunday to work their way to the remote Heller Creek campground in the wooded mountains about 50 miles southeast of Avery, Idaho.

The shooting appears to have been an accident, said sheriff’s Lt. Spike Angle. Officials have not released the names of the 20-year-old Rathdrum man who shot Collotzi or the 20-year-old Post Falls man who was with them.

Officials have yet to decide whether or not to file charges.

But Albert Collotzi said he has forgiven the young man who killed his son - a man who was one of his son’s best friends.

“I talked to his dad last night,” Albert Collotzi said Monday. “The boy was shook up. They have known each other for a lot of years. We have no animosity there.”

The Collotzi family lived in Priest River for about six years before moving to Utah last year. Jared Collotzi was spending the summer in Coeur d’Alene working on log homes, his father said Monday.

He and two of his friends decided to go camping for the weekend at the Heller Creek Campground.

“He was probably, in his mind, born 150 years too late,” Albert Collotzi said of his son. “He loved the out of doors. He loved the mountains and the trees and the animals. That was his passion.”

It was about 9 p.m. Saturday, and the three men were standing around their camp fire. Collotzi was firing his gun, target practicing, Lt. Angle said.

A shotgun lay on the ground nearby and Collotzi’s Rathdrum friend went to pick it up to move it out of the way, Angle said. When he picked up the gun, it fired, hitting Collotzi in the neck from 15 feet away.

A twig or piece of brush on the ground could have pulled the trigger as the man picked up the gun, Angle said. The man told deputies he’s not sure if his finger hit the trigger or not. The men admitted they had been drinking alcohol before the incident, Angle said.

The two men tried to stem the flow of blood as their friend lay dying, Angle said. When that didn’t work, they hopped in Collotzi’s truck and headed out for help. In their haste, they high-centered the vehicle and had to set out on foot.

They wandered onto Jenkins’ campground, with his wife and 5-year-old son already in bed.

“They said ‘Hey, is anybody there? I shot my friend, he’s up the road,”’ Jenkins explained. “And I said something like ‘Oh my God.”’

Jenkins brought the two men into his camp to warm up by his fire and gave them a soda pop.

As soon as he had calmed down, he left one of the men at the camp with his wife and took the man who had fired the shot back up to their camp.

On the way up, he stopped by another campground and woke up two men and sent them to call authorities. The nearest phone was 13 miles away.

By the time Jenkins made his way to Collotzi, it was far too late. “The guy needed a surgeon right away,” Jenkins said. “He died rather quickly.”

Jenkins works for Medstar, a company that airlifts injured people to hospitals.

“I deal with stuff like that a lot, but for some reason it affected me more,” he said. “I didn’t have time to prepare. I wasn’t there to do anything but camp. It kind of threw me for a loop.”

Jenkins and his wife kept the two men at their campground for the five hours until authorities arrived. For his family’s safety, he borrowed a 9 mm handgun from one of the other campers while he waited.

As it turned out he didn’t need it. “They were shaken, scared and cold,” Jenkins said. “They just sat by the fire to stay warm. It’s really a sad thing.”

, DataTimes