Death in a Pit and a PR Nightmare

Later afternoon, March 4, I was there when they called it off, stood on the lip of that old mine shaft, peering down into the darkness where a man still breathed but couldn’t be saved. The wind came in low, whispering through the sage, and the sun had that dull afternoon glare, turning everything the color of old bones.

The call came from an abandoned shaft from the Murphy’s Mine Complex, forgotten but still waiting. It had been there since 1895, a wound cut deep into the rock, left to fester under the desert sky.

That day, it took another. His name was Devin Westenskow.

A driller by trade. A young man with his whole life ahead of him.

He’d been out there with a couple of friends, looking for adventure, maybe just killing time. One step too far, the ground gave way beneath him, a straight drop—one hundred and ninety feet.

We sent a camera down first. The image flickered, grainy and unsteady, but it showed us enough.

He was alive. Barely.

Pinned under something, his breath slow, his body broken. He moved a hand once, like a man reaching out from a dream, but that was all.

The first team went down slowly and carefully. The walls crumbled around them like old bread, and it didn’t take much for the whole thing to begin collapsing.

One of our guys took a rock to the helmet, splitting it clean. Another few inches, and we’d have been pulling him up dead instead of just rattled.

We tried again.

But the mountain had decided, and there was no arguing with it. Every attempt brought more rock crashing down.

The risk was too high. One more try, and we wouldn’t just be leaving one man down there.

I was there when they made the call, heard it over the radio, and felt it settle in my gut.

We weren’t getting him out. Not alive.

A priest came. Said the words while we stood above, helpless.

Down there, in the dark, his breathing slowed. Then it stopped.

At 12:30 p.m., the coroner called it. That was it.

His family was there. They took it hard but took it well. The one saving grace in all of it was Devin’s family.

His grandmother said, “The family feels that if Jesus Christ was buried in a tomb, it’s good enough for Devin.”

I don’t know if that was faith talking or just a family trying to find some peace in the worst of it. That kind of grace is rare and deserves consideration.

We sealed the shaft not long after. Poured concrete over it like a gravestone no one would ever visit.

But there are others out there—hundreds, maybe more. Waiting.

I think about that day, the dust settling after we left, the silence that stretched long into the afternoon. About the man we couldn’t save.

The land is old out here, older than the bones buried beneath it. And sometimes it keeps the dead.

That was rough land and unforgiving, and men who wandered too far off the beaten path sometimes paid the price for it. The high desert of Nevada had seen its share of lost souls, men who strayed too deep into the hills or had the bad luck to take a wrong step where the old-timers had long quit walking.

That was how it went for Devin Westenskow. Out in the backcountry with friends, looking over the bones of the past, he stepped into the wrong place—a vent shaft to an abandoned mine—and fell nearly two hundred feet. He survived the fall but took a hard knock to the head. He lingered a while, then died before the sun had set.

What happened next was a damn shame, not because men didn’t try to help, but because no one seemed too keen on telling the truth about it.
Don’t fault the rescuers.

They went down the shaft and took a chance, but rock and debris started falling, making it impossible to reach him. Hard men, willing men, but no fool ever lived long in the desert, and they knew when to call it quits.

That’s not where the blame falls. The real trouble started when the powers that be—Pershing County and the Bureau of Land Management—failed to say as much.

Instead, what made the news was a nightmare: a man left to die while others stood by. That wasn’t true, but once a story like that gets rolling, it’s like a rockslide—you’re not stopping it.

The world heard only the worst of it, and before long, Nevada had the reputation of a place where men weren’t worth saving. That wasn’t the case.

If only the authorities had spoken up sooner. If they had made it clear that rescue tried and Devin had passed before the first story hit the newswire, the tale might have been different. Instead, they let the silence stretch too long, and the world filled in the gaps on its own.

Maybe the men in charge will learn something from this. Perhaps they won’t.

But out in the Nevada backcountry, where the land is old, mines run deep, and the truth has a way of getting buried, too.