A Montgomery County man who disappeared while out with friends in Adams Morgan on New Year’s Eve was found dead Wednesday night, police said.
The body of Michael Steven Poe, 23, of Clarksburg, was found 50 feet down a rooftop ventilation shaft, blocks from the trendy Northwest Washington entertainment district.
Authorities are awaiting results of an autopsy to determine a cause of death.
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Officer Araz Alali, a D.C. police spokesman, said detectives are trying to determine how Poe fell down the shaft, which is located between a rowhouse and an apartment building in the 1800 block of Biltmore St. NW.
Montgomery County police said that Poe had been last seen with his friends at Shenanigans Bar on 18th Street in Adams Morgan about 12:30 a.m. Tuesday. Police said the friends split up and Poe never returned from the District. They said his last cellphone conversation was at 2:30 a.m.
Poe’s family filed a missing person’s report with Montgomery County police on Tuesday, and police there and in the District had been searching for him.
About 10:40 p.m. Wednesday, a resident of the 1800 block of Biltmore Street went up to the roof of her building, peered down the shaft and spotted Poe’s body, then called the police.
Police said the woman told them she had heard people partying on the roof on New Year’s Eve. The people apparently had walked across the rooftops from a nearby apartment building, police said.
It took firefighters from the city’s Confined Space Rescue team about 40 minutes to rappel down the shaft and retrieve Poe’s body, a department spokesman said. Poe was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the Gazette newspaper, Poe graduated from Poolesville High School in 2007, and then enrolled at Virginia Tech. He graduated from Virginia Tech in May.
On Wednesday, Poe’s increasingly worried family and friends were handing out flyers in different parts of the District and in Montgomery County trying to locate him.
“My son has never done anything remotely like this,” Leslie Poe told the Gazette. “My husband is down there with friends, all down around the Adams Morgan area, Woodley Park, in Rock Creek Park.”
