Greg Lightfoot started to fret when his dad and mom did not make it again to their Lubbock, Texas house on November 27.
Earlier that day, Linda and Gary Lightfoot had pushed roughly three hours to Panhandle to have fun Thanksgiving with household which was a routine journey they’d made earlier than.
As night fell and there was nonetheless no signal of them, Greg reached out to family members to see if anybody knew why they have been delayed.
“I referred to as and requested how the day went,” he tells PEOPLE, explaining that nobody recalled something uncommon. Members of the family instructed him the couple appeared effective once they left.
When Linda and Gary didn’t return house that evening, they have been reported lacking. 5 days later, authorities found their our bodies in a distant space of Quay County, New Mexico, a number of hours from the place they lived.
“Tragically, each people have been discovered deceased on the scene,” the Quay County Sheriff’s Workplace stated in an announcement, including that the investigation into their deaths was ongoing.
“It was definitely a shock and sudden,” Greg says. “We’re dealing with it in the future at a time, mainly. We’re simply making an attempt to get by way of it as finest we are able to.”
As he tries to piece collectively what occurred, Greg believes his dad and mom might have altered their route after leaving Panhandle.
“My concept now could be that they went to Amarillo after leaving Panhandle to get to I-27 to come back again house,” he says.
Greg notes that his mom didn’t have any identified critical well being points however suspects one thing might have gone fallacious whereas she was driving. His father, he provides, now not drove.
“I don’t know if she was having mini-strokes or one thing on the way in which west towards Amarillo,” he says.
Greg thinks his dad and mom might have develop into disoriented or overwhelmed and tried to show again towards Panhandle, lacking an important flip and persevering with on to Groom as a substitute. After realizing they’d gone too far east, he believes they rotated as soon as extra however have been unable to appropriate their course.
They have been later discovered collectively beside their automobile, its trunk open. Greg says there’s a concept that his mom died first, noting that she was found with a jacket positioned over her face and torso.
“We assumed my dad did that,” he says.
Whereas post-mortem outcomes haven’t but been launched, Greg says it’s believed his dad and mom finally froze to demise.
Gary, a navy veteran who later spent many years working in regulation enforcement, and Linda, who constructed her profession in banking, had been married for 62 years on the time of their deaths.
“My dad and mom have been all the time attention-grabbing, enjoyable folks, very personable,” Greg stated. “They favored to journey. They favored to assist folks out once they might, whether or not it was coworkers or associates or folks they simply met.”
Trying again, Greg describes his dad and mom’ Thanksgiving go to with family members as a bittersweet second. The chance for them to spend time with family members was a “mixed-blessing,” he defined.
“It was good that they bought to see everybody and have a very good expertise to type of say goodbye, although they didn’t notice that that was what was occurring.”
