Suicide was the manner of Alan Abrahamson's death in January, but he faked it as a murder with the help of a weather balloon, perhaps for life insurance purposes, detectives now think a month after the 71-year-old's shooting stunned his quiet gated community of Palm Beach Gardens in Florida.
The police department there released its first public report on the death of Abrahamson last past week, surmising that Abrahamson shot himself and let the gun float away tied to the balloon. The Washington Post reported.
Police told the Abrahamson's family in March that they had closed the case based on that information, ruling the case a suicide instead of a homicide, but they were still searching for a helium tank Abrahamson had purchased.
While authorities didn't confirm a motive, they noted that Abrahamson had several life insurance policies and had searched online for whether such policies pay off for suicides, The Palm Beach Post reported.
"To be honest with you, it's just a bizarre situation," clinical psychologist Doctor Raphi Wald told WPEC-TV last week. "I can honestly say that in my practice, I've never had anyone fake a homicide and commit suicide."
According to The Washington Post, Abrahamson's body was found in a field on Jan. 25, just out of the sight of surveillance cameras in the area. No weapon was found at the scene and there were few clues to go on.
Police later discovered that Abrahamson had purchased a weather balloon last Christmas Day and the helium tank two days before his death.
Authorities said that while searching his phone and looking at his web searches, they found queries dating as far back as 2009 about suicide and one as late as 2017 that asked, "How many cubic feet of helium do you need to raise one pound?"
The week of his death, authorities noted, Abrahamson searched sunrise and sunset times, the Palm Beach Post said, and the night before his death, Abrahamson deliberately deleted his Dropbox software, a service for storing files online.
Detectives determined with the help of a simulator that if Abrahamson had used a weather balloon tied to a gun, it would have likely blown into the Atlantic north of the Bahamas before bursting and falling into the water, The Washington Post said.
A forensics investigator also noticed a trail of blood on Abrahamson’s shirt that led from a stain near the wound outward toward a shoulder, police wrote, "possibly indicating that something was in the blood and dragged across to the top of the shirt."
WPEC-TV reported that Abrahamson worked for Every Watt Matters at the time of his death.
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