A man walks into a popular park in June. He has a tent and a backpack that includes only a few items and heads for a remote wooded area. He never leaves the park. His body is found months later. His death is a mystery and his life turns out to be shrouded in mystery. No one seems to know how the man got to Orcas or even his whereabouts for the last year.
“We’ve run into a lot of dead ends,” said San Juan County Coroner Randy Gaylord.
A fisherman found the decomposed human remains with a wallet in a collapsed tent located off-trail in a secluded area of Moran State Park near the bridge over the Cascade Lake lagoon on Sept. 6. Moran State Park is a 5,579-acre camping park with five freshwater lakes and over 30 miles of hiking trails.
On Sept. 16, the remains were positively identified as Mehmet Tokgozoglu, a 51-year-old design engineer born in Kansas, according to Gaylord.
Although the body was severely decomposed and partially skeletonized, one hand was in good enough condition to pull fingerprints.
Tokgozoglu worked for Raytheon, a defense contractor and industrial corporation, until 2006, and he had a security clearance, which consisted of fingerprints found in the FBI’s database. Gaylord worked with Snohomish Medical Examiner’s Office to positively match the prints. As for the cause of death, Gaylord said at this point it’s “undetermined.”
“There was nothing about where he was found to make a conclusion that there was a suicide or some kind of improper death or homicide,” said Gaylord. “As to whether it was a natural death or an accident we can’t quite tell.”
According to Undersheriff Bruce Distler, the San Juan County’s Sheriff’s Office turned the case over to the coroner’s because they also concluded that it was not a homicide.
“For instance, no weapons were found and there was nothing pointing to anything sinister,” said Distler. “At this point in time we don’t have an indication one way or another.”
The facts that are known have been compiled from Tokgozoglu’s past.
From interviewing the deceased man’s family members, a landlord and former employers, Gaylord has pieced together a patchy narrative. Tokgozoglu was born to a Turkish father, an orthopedic surgeon, and an American mother in Kansas.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Tokgozoglu attended Kansas State University from 1992 to 1998.
He was self-employed since 2006 as a design engineer focusing on electronic design and computers. According to Gaylord, one landlord heard that Tokgozoglu wanted to design apps for smart phones and perhaps wanted to move to Seattle to pursue that goal. Even more telling may be the newspaper found in his backpack dated May 21, 2014 with a front page spread on “Amazon battles gaming giants.”
The newspaper also sported a large advertisement for visiting the San Juans. Gaylord said Tokgozoglu’s family described him as extremely private, especially when it came to his work at Raytheon, possibly because it required a security clearance. Tokgozoglu’s last known address was in the Dallas-Plano area in 2013. At some point he put items in a storage unit. According to Gaylord, any history about Tokgozoglu after August 2013 could not be found. What is known is that Tokgozoglu pitched a tent in an isolated area near Cascade Lake close to a popular trail. He was only in the area for a night or two.
“The site wasn’t trampled down like someone had been there long; there was no campfire, no food or trash,” said Gaylord.
There was also no food found in the backpack or the surrounding area. Several bottles of water were found by the tent.
Gaylord estimates that the man died in early June. A computer and a hard drive were found in Tokgozoglu’s backpack, but the computer was wet and would not start and the hard drive was encrypted. Gaylord hopes the public might know something about Tokgozoglu or the location of a car registered to him — a green Toyota Camry with Texas license DS9 S617, which could hold more information. The car has not yet been found.
“There are still a lot of unanswered questions,” said Gaylord.
