WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Police are investigating the “untimely death” of a man whose body was found under the Urban Bridge on Sunday afternoon.
At approximately 2 p.m. on Sunday, Hartford Police got a tip about a deceased individual under the bridge, Lt. William Furnari, of the Hartford Police Department’s Outreach Division, said in a Monday phone interview.
“We got a call that somebody was located under the Urban Bridge and subsequently located somebody deceased under the Urban Bridge,” which sits between the Bugbee Senior Center and the Co-op Food Store, Furnari said.
Furnari declined to identify the individual.
The Hartford Fire Department and a representative of the State Medical Examiner’s Office also responded to the location where the body was found, he added.
The investigation into the man’s death is ongoing.
“I’m not able to release anything further at this time,” Furnari said.
The news of the man’s death was first reported by Daybreak.
The bridge where the man’s body was found on Sunday is an area frequently used as an encampment by people who are unhoused, just down the road from where Upper Valley Haven is building a 9,000-square-foot, low-barrier shelter and resource center which is slated to open later this year.
In late December, Upper Valley residents gathered in White River Junction to hold candlelight vigils for 16 people whose lives were shortened by homelessness in 2025.
Those deaths included that of Rick Riff, 54, whose body was found in March of last year under the Urban Bridge, the Valley News previously reported. Riff had throat cancer and was not in good health at the time of his death, friends and relatives told the Valley News at the time.
Christopher Lane, 32, and Mylin Paul, 28, also were both found dead outdoors in White River Junction last summer, just 11 days apart.
Lane, who was found dead in a tent on a side street off of Maple Street on July 5, was among 30 households staying at the Shady Lawn Motel through Vermont’s motel voucher program when the state stopped funding the program July 1.
The day before his death, Paul, who was originally from North Carolina, sought connections to housing and a phone through a clinic at Lebanon’s emergency winter shelter on Mechanic Street. He had been released from the Grafton County House of Corrections in late June.
Both Lane and Paul died of accidental “acute mixed intoxication” from multiple drugs, according to their death certificates.
