Neighbors joined in grief after death of sons

The death of a Grandview Heights teen in a Northwest Side quarry on Monday was the second tragedy in three weeks to stun the residents of a single block of Westwood Avenue.

Colin Jourdan, the 17-year-old Grandview Heights High School graduate who died in a fall from a quarry cliff, lived next door to the family of Charles “Chase” Gage, a 2013 Grandview graduate who was killed in a May 14 car crash near Springfield.

Residents said the twin losses suffered by the Jourdan and Gage families have left the entire block heartbroken. No one contacted would speak publicly about the tragedies, out of respect for the families’ privacy.

Columbus police Sgt. David Sicilian said investigators plan to give the friends and family of Jourdan time to grieve before interviewing some of them further.

“We’re fairly comfortable with the fact that it was accidental,” he said of the fall.

In separate and frustrating calls to 911 made in the minutes after Jourdan fell, one of the two teens he was with and a parent not on the scene tried to describe where they were on the sprawling quarry property east of Dublin Road.

“We’re down by the quarry,” a boy said. “He’s at the bottom of it; I don’t know how to get to the bottom.”

As the call-taker pressed for details about where to send rescuers, the boy implored them to send a helicopter and became so angry that he hung up.

The mother who called 911 said she was stuck relaying thirdhand information.

“My son called frantic, and I don’t know where they are,” she said.

As she talked to someone else on her end of the line, the woman asked whether the boys were in the same place where they’d fished the day before. She can be heard saying that the location had been previously described by the teens as “super-cool.”

“Is that the same place?” she could be heard asking someone.

Paramedics found the teens about six minutes after they were called, in an area of the inactive Shelly Materials quarry near the Griggs Dam on the Scioto River. They removed Jourdan from the base of a 90foot cliff, and he died at Mount Carmel West hospital a short time later.

Police said he had been walking too close to the brushy edge when he slipped over.

Ten days before Jourdan and other members of the 2015 Grandview Heights High School class graduated, the community learned that Gage, a sophomore at Wittenberg University in Springfield, had been killed when he lost control of his car on a curve on Rt. 55 in Urbana.

At 11:40 p.m. on Monday, the high school tweeted, “Tell those you care for that you love them every. Single. Day. We will never forget you Colin. Never. Ever.”

A celebration of Jourdan’s life will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday in the shelter house at Wyman Woods Park in Grandview Heights.