Tracked by millions
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Apparently, I’m only one of millions who closely followed the Kim tragedy in the news. MSNBC.com got 1 million hits in 90 minutes and SFGate.com got 3,300 hits per minute in the hour after the body was found. The story got more attention than the Iraq Study Group report.
More articles that have fed my unrelenting curiosity:
- The mother and daughters were spotted first by a local pilot who had a hunch as to their location. He flew out on his own to look for them. The wrong turn they made off the National Forest road is a common mistake by drivers because the correct road looks narrower than the other road they took that had no outlet (and was supposed to be gated but wasn’t).
- Someone drew a map of James Kim’s hike around the forest and where his body was found, heartbreakingly close to the family car but impossible to reach due to cliffs on either side of the creek they found him floating in. If he had continued a few miles on the road in the direction they were driving, he would have found a vacant fishing resort which the rescuers checked several times.
- James Kim relied on an old survival tactic that has fallen out of favor because it often leads to hypothermia – i.e. following a creek or river in the hope of finding houses alongside them. This choice led to him actually swimming through the icy creek and getting soaking wet.
- Autopsy results show cause of death as hypothermia and exposure. He thought the closest town, Galice, was 4 miles away, when it was actually 15 miles away. The family heard helicopters twice before James struck out on his own.
- He was probably dead for only a few hours, appearing to have slipped and fallen on some mossy rocks in the creek where his body was found.
I broke and read the sf comments in lieu of home work yesterday (thanks a lot!
). I was astounded by the asinine people who lacked compassion and obsessively responded/overreacted to (the correct on my opinion) criticism by others like they had nothing to do better than obsess over a message board. Maybe it’s the only place in the world where they got attention or something…
Yeah, those comments where people responded to personal attacks were unreadable. I was also shocked by the Oregon Forum posts that called Bay Area people “those people down there” who don’t know anything about the outdoors. I thought there was a small point in the comments that said the blog was not a support forum for the Kims, but still, I don’t think it was meant to be a soap box for uncaring people.
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