Family, Friends Baffled Over Man's Fatal Fall At Soldier Field
WOODSTOCK, Ill. (CBS) -- Twenty-three-year old Stuart Haverty was having a great time at Sunday's Bears game, a friend says, when he left his seat at half-time.
He never came back.
The Harvard man was last seen high up near the big cement columns west of the playing field. He fell to his death, and his friends and police are trying to figure out what happened.
Choking back tears, Charles Haverty reflects on the untimely and unlikely death of his grandson. In ways that still aren't clear, the younger Haverty somehow fell 35 feet to his death from a gated-off balcony on the west side of Soldier Field during the game.
"When you're 80 years old, you don't expect to lose somebody that young, but that's life," Charles Haverty told CBS 2's Vince Gerasole on Monday.
With his Bears pulling ahead of the Philadelphia Eagles early in the first quarter, it should have been a picture-perfect day for the lifelong fan.
"We were high-fiving everybody sitting around us and each other," says Bruce Glass of Fox Tool and Machine.
Glass took Haverty and five other employees for an annual guy's day out that seemed to be going so well.
"Stuart and I were sitting together in the southwest corner, and we left our seats and he said he had to go to the bathroom," Glass said. "I told him I would wait for him, and that's the last I saw of him."
Friends say Haverty was a skilled tree climber. Whether he scaled the gate as a personal challenge or to smoke a cigarette, as authorities originally guessed, is still under investigation.
"There's all sorts of stuff on the Internet saying he was very drunk," Glass said. "He was not, he was quite sober."
Starting as a high school sophomore, Haverty first apprenticed and then worked at Fox Tool and Machine in Woodstock. His family was impressed that he purchased his own home by age 20.
The medical examiner has ruled Haverty's death an accident caused by multiple injuries from a fall. They won't comment on whether toxicology reports are being conducted.
The Chicago Bears, in a written statement, offered condolences.
The area in question has a 3-foot-high fence and then a 2-foot-wide ledge, which is difficult to access. This is the first death reported at Soldier Field since renovations in 2003. Before that, the area was the luxury suite level and not accessible to the general public.
