Lisa Trigg
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
The death of a cable television installer found lying in a Terre Haute alley has been ruled accidental.
Kyle Alan Torgersen, 27, apparently fell from a ladder while working in an alley in the 200 block of South 23rd Street sometime Friday.
There were no witnesses to the incident, said Detective Dale Blunk of the Terre Haute Police Department, and Torgersen was already dead when a woman coming home found him lying in the alley.
Head trauma was ruled the cause of death by Coroner Roland Kohr, who reported that the impact caused Torgersen to lose consciousness and later die.
Blunk said it was unclear how high Torgersen was on the ladder when he fell, but he was not wearing a safety harness or hard hat. It is also unclear whether the man slipped from the ladder, fell or experienced difficulty because of the extreme heat of the day, he said.
“We didn’t find anything suspicious at all about the circumstances,” Blunk said.
The lines that Torgersen was working on were tested by Duke Energy and did not have any electricity running to them, he said.
Torgersen was found around 2:50 p.m., but it is unknown at what time he fell. A person who lives nearby told police she was in the alley around 11:30 a.m. that day and that Torgersen was not there at that time.
Torgersen was employed by Utili-Comm South Inc., a Georgia-based company that is contracted by companies such as Time Warner Cable to install cable television lines and do in-home installations.
Utili-Comm company president John Pudenz said the company employees are in shock over Torgersen’s death.
“We just knew him as a great young kid, and he had a great attitude,” Pudenz said.
Pudenz confirmed that Torgersen, who had worked for the company for about three years, was not wearing safety equipment as required by the company.
“Something like this has never happened,” Pudenz said. “We’ve been in business for 10 years.”
Utili-Comm South Manager Brian Clouse said Torgersen was doing a maintenance repair in the alley, and he would have been 20 to 23 feet in the air doing the repair work. Clouse said the repair work was not complete at the time Torgersen died.
Clouse also said that Torgersen’s safety harness and hard hat were found in his truck at the scene. The safety harness, which is like a netting or mesh that fits over his clothes, would have caught Torgersen if he had been wearing it.
Pam Browning of Utili-Comm South said the accidental death was the first in the company’s history.
“He was a really good guy,” Browning said of Torgersen, “one of our best installers.”
Obituary information for Torgersen states that memorial services will be conducted Friday in Linton.
Lisa Trigg can be reached at (812) 231-4254 or lisa.trigg@tribstar.com.
