The death of Nick Wiltgen, senior digital meteorologist at The Weather Channel, has been ruled a suicide.
Early Monday, reports emerged that Wiltgen had crashed his car in an Atlanta parking garage Sunday night. He crashed into an adjacent hotel and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Now, the Medical Examiner’s office has ruled the death intentional.
“Wiltgen died from major head and brain injury resulting from an intentional act of driving a vehicle into/through the concrete wall of a parking deck … the manner of death has been classified as suicide,” read the ME’s report.
“At The Weather Channel, there are a lot of people who love weather. And Nick was certainly one of those, but Nick really loved this job because he cared about people. No one took the mission of keeping people safe from big storms more to heart than Nick. At all hours of the night and day, he would track weather in as many as eight languages. He would work around the clock to make sure we had the latest and most accurate updates to every event. And he would fight tooth and nail to make sure we did everything we could to explain the dangers of bad weather to our viewers,” said a joint statement from Cameron Clayton, President of Product and Technology, Neil Katz, Editor in Chief, and Patty Cox, Managing Editor of The Weather Channel.
The weather community has suffered a stunning loss in the death of Nick Wiltgen https://t.co/RGMB1EogsU pic.twitter.com/pLLkNYBL64
— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) January 27, 2016
Wiltgen was just 39.
Saddened by the loss of my friend and colleague @WxNick. Our wx facts will never be as full. You will be truly missed.
— Mark Elliot (@twcMarkElliot) January 25, 2016
Wiltgen has worked for The Weather Channel for over 15 years. For the first 11, he delivered on-air forecasts for radio and in 2012 he switched over to digital production.