PEWAUKEE, Wis. (CBS 58) -- A man in his 40s died of a suspected lightning strike Wednesday, April 15, after being found unresponsive in a Pewaukee Kwik Trip parking lot during severe storms, according to police.
The man was identified by family to be 41-year-old Peter Paul Garamone Sr. He was a long-haul trucker from Pennsylvania with a wife and son.
Peter Paul Garamone Sr., age 41, picture provided by family
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Waukesha police say preliminary information indicates Garamone was struck by lightning while walking through the parking lot. He reportedly called first responders when it happened and later died at an area hospital.
This is the first fatal lightning strike in the United States of 2026. It is also the second lightning fatality in Wisconsin in the last seven months.
I will return the geography of lightning strike deaths in a moment.
Now, this doesn’t match the CDC numbers, which, for 2025 (provisionally), are currently 29.
Lightning strike deaths, coded in ICD-10 as X33 (Victim of lightning), are accidental deaths… and are censored for 6 months. The CDC stats are still provisional until they’re finalized either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.
There are disparities between what’s reported in the news and what is recorded on death certificates, as you can see in the above data.
Either way, 2025 showed an uptick in lightning strike deaths, partly due to a few incidents last year where multiple people were struck.
When the death numbers are so low, and the population of the U.S. is so high, I doubt this uptick is particularly meaningful. Yet.
Here is one of their maps from 2025: [this is inert — go to their page to interact]
This is coming from a company that deals with environmental property damage — lightning causes more than just death. Though, livestock death from lightning is a big problem:
The sky flashed white, and in a single instant, the whole herd dropped dead. So did their caretaker. Mike Morgan, a longtime Colorado rancher, was feeding his cattle at the time of the strike on Saturday, May 25, and did not survive. While these kinds of lightning-induced mass-casualty incidents are fairly common, the tragedy was the first of its kind in Colorado.
Morgan was standing in the back of a trailer, and the cattle had bunched around him to feed. The close proximity of the animals likely made them particularly vulnerable. Morgan’s wife was leading horses to the trailer at the time, while her father was driving the trailer’s tractor. Both individuals remained uninjured.
George Crocket, a local coroner, told the Colorado Sun that it was the worst lightning strike he’d ever seen in the area. “I’ve seen horses get killed, but it’s usually one at a time,” he said.
How can a single bolt take so many lives?
This isn’t the first time a lightning strike has instantaneously dropped an entire herd. In fact, lightning accounts for about 80 percent of accidental livestock deaths, according to USDA data.
“It is not unusual to have a large group of animals felled by lightning,” Steven Clark, the president of the Lightning Data Center at Lakewood’s St. Anthony Hospital, said in a recent statement. “More often than not, it will be a ground current. In other words, the lightning will hit an object on earth, and the current will flow through the ground and kill the animals.”
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Farm animals like cows are among the likely to be affected. For one thing, they’re four-legged. That orientation means a current can travel through the ground, up the creature’s forelegs, and down its rear legs. Along the way, the electrical current must pass through the animal’s heart.
Cows also tend to huddle together, which increases the chances that a bolt of lightning flowing through ground will be able to take out multiple animals before the electrical charge has time to disperse and weaken.
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Agricultural workers—including ranchers, migrant workers, and fieldworkers—are more vulnerable to lightning than almost any other population on the planet. This is especially true in areas of the world where there’s little to no shelter from storms. While the Colorado incident is a sobering reminder of the dangers farm workers face, it also bears some important takeaways for outdoor recreationists.
Hikers are often told they’re safe from lightning as long as they’re not standing on a ridgeline. That’s one of many pervasive lightning myths. This strike took place on flat ground—a reminder that nowhere outdoors is entirely risk-free during a storm. The strike also happened on a summer afternoon—a time notorious for thunderstorms in the Rockies. This critical 12:00 pm to 4:00 pm window is when 70 percent of injurious lightning strikes happen in Colorado.
Notice the relatively high number of lightning strike deaths in Colorado. There are a lot of hikers in the mile-high state.
Unfortunately, if you’re out in the great outdoors hiking, there’s not many choices for shelter if you’re caught unawares by a thunderstorm. They can be a surprise.
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