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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- Update:

A woman found a body in Monument Creek Tuesday morning in a section of the creek west of Penrose Main hospital.

Police said a woman walking her dogs spotted part of the body sticking up out of the water and called authorities. They said the body has been there for a while and they aren’t sure if this is an accident, a suicide or something more sinister. But for now they are investigating it as a murder.

"She had taken the dogs down towards the river itself. The dogs were running around splashing that sort of thing and that’s where she noticed it from. This is not something you were going to see from the pathway itself - you had to be in the river," Colorado Springs Police Sgt. Darrin Abbink said.

Police said it's the body of a man in his 30s. They said his body was pinned under tree branches that had to be cutaway by fire fighters.

"It does look like it has been there for a little while," Abbink said. "There is some what appears to be decomposition going on, and it hard to tell at this point how long its been there."

Police don’t yet know if the man was murdered or if this was something else.

"We'll be looking of course at missing persons reports to see if there is any possibility that this is tied in to anything there, if we've had anything recently," Abbink said.

People said it is normally a nice quiet path, and they said it's disturbing to know they've been biking and jogging past a dead body.

"I am very surprised. That’s shocking in fact" one bicyclist said.

"Really surprised because I was just on this trail last night," a second bicyclist said.

But the discovery of a body along a favorite path wont scare them away.

"Its not really scary, its just sort of an everyday thing. You sort of expect things like that when you ride trails like this," the second bicyclist said.           

Police said they wont know how the man died until an autopsy is finished.
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Original story:

A woman found a man's body under the bridge along Monument Creek at Beacon Street and W. Van Buren Street while walking her dog on the Santa Fe trail around 8:20 a.m. Tuesday.

The Colorado Springs Police Department, the coroner's office and the Violent Crimes Unit investigated the scene. Police said the man was in his 30s but do not know how long he had been there.

The Colorado Springs Fire Department was also on scene to help extricate the body.

The coroner will conduct an autopsy later this week to determine cause and time of death.