Letters to the Editor
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Please, no more regulations
I've read enough to learn the credit card and cell phone records probably could have saved Kim, and gotten the whole family out a lot quicker, but would the proposed changes impinge on privacy? I fear the California Legislature, which always responds to every media-hyped problem, will do something half baked, particularly now that Feinstein is getting involved.
As to the Forest Service, I feel nothing whatever should be done differently. There were signs for the correct roads, and gates get broken or accidentally left unlocked. Whichever happened in this case, what was the Forest Service to do about it? Never make mistakes? Because even if they don't locks are breakable. So then what do you do, send someone out on locked gate patrol? How often? How much money you want to spend, not on a problem, on something which might become a problem if someone makes some bad decisions?
I would also like to point out, you look at the number of people who get trapped every year, it's not that high. People mention some poor man who slowly starved to death years back, and it's very grim, but it seems quite rare as far as I can tell from news reports. Do you spend a big pile of money to deal with a very rare event, where there is not even any certainty it will save one person? It seems driven by hysteria.
But one thing does bug me. Presumably, the author of this article knows a lot more than I do, but I wondered if maybe the search effort was disorganized. There must have been volunteers trying to help out. With appropriate vehicles and gear, and an organized search system, a lot of miles could be covered in a couple of days. Get a couple dozen cars with GPS, have them drive up these roads with some central authority knowing where they are going, and turn around when they can't go further. Then mark off what areas have been searched. I could not find any definite statement of the mileage of all back roads on the possible shortcuts through the mountains, but even if it was many hundreds of miles, even if a car can only make 10 to 20 miles per hour, it seemed like all the unlockyed roads could have been checked in a couple days with a moderate sized team of volunteers with 4WD. If I am badly wrong, I wish someone would tell me exactly why.
Maybe they need a better protocol for searches, and to have a small team of Forestry and/or National Park people who would go to the scene, wherever it was, and take over searchs in any park or forest land. That would not impinge on anyone's rights, should not cost a huge amount of money, and not mess around with systems which seem to work OK almost all the time.
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Fair argument, TACKY conclusion
Keech may have a case, but her final conclusion is overreaching and, well, condescendingly mean:
"In the end it comes down to whether people are prepared for the wilderness, whether they respect it or even believe that such a thing still exists."
The article's basic point is that James Kim died partly, or mostly, because of James Kim's poor judgement. That's fine. It's a valid point, and one that takes courage to make, given the fact that most people's human impulse is to cut the dead a break.
But what the fuck gives Keech the right to take that next step and claim, implicitly, that Kim doesn't have respect for the wilderness? That Kim might not have even believed such a thing really existed? What?!
Look, the guy's dead. Is it really necessary for Keech to use his corpse for the service of an environmentalist agenda?
This is the kind of tackiness that makes me hate being on the same side as people like Keech.
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A Worthy Attempt, Yet Flawed
I am a former journalist and Seattle resident who, along with an Oregon native and current coastal resident, has established the KimTragedy.info website. We give the definitive account of the events of Nov. 25-Dec. 6.
Sarah Keech's article put the emphasis where it belonged, on the negligence shown by James and Kati Kim. They chose a remote, dangerous mountain road, and in doing so they ignored four warnings. They made a variety of other misjudgments.
I part company with Salon on a couple of issues. Salon wrote:
[Spencer] Kim rightly notes that time was lost before credit card and cellphone records were released to searchers, and that it was the hotel and restaurant receipts and the last-known "ping" from the cellphone that, once known to rescuers, led to the rescue of Kati Kim and her daughters.
We investigated Spencer Kim's claims about the records and found that none of them are true. Nor is it true that the cellphone pink let to the rescue of the Kim survivors. I'm sorry to say that Salon simply got it wrong.
In fact, before police ever contacted the hotel in Portland, James Kim's sister, Eva, had given ther bank account and credit card information to San Francisco police. The purpose was to find out, by searching credit card transactions, where the Kims were headed when they left Portland on Nov. 25.
Eva Kim also provided the Portland Police with the name and phone number of the TuTuTun Lodge, the Kims' destination that night. Portland Police confirmed it with the hotel, and contacted friends the Kims had visited in Portland and prior to their having arrived there.
All of this is confirmed by Portland Police records linked by our website. The records show that the department's request to the hotel was superfluous, something confirmed by the police department's failure to obtain a subpoena the following day. Privacy concerns played no role in events; police had what they needed, the claims of a Portland detective notwithstanding.
The location information provided by the cellphone ping had no impact on the search. By Friday, Dec. 1, a day and a half after the Kims' housesitter had filed a missing persons report in San Francisco, local searchers had focused their efforts on the area where Mrs. Kim and her children, and later Mr. Kim's body, were found. State Police didn't pass the ping information to local searchers under Dec. 2, and it did not narrow the geographic parameters of the search.
Finally, Salon and the rest of the media have thus far ignored a truly startling aspect of the case: The possibility that Spencer Kim’s efforts to augment official efforts with private helicopters kept his son and family from being rescued on the very first day of the effort, Friday, Dec. 1.
On that morning, local authorities had requested a helicopter from the Oregon Army National Guard, heaquartered in Salem. The helicopter was to be staffed by locals who were familiar with the terrain. It was to search within the Rogue Wilderness between the Oregon towns of Agness and Merlin, where all of the Kims, alive and deceased, were eventually found.
The Guard agreed to send the helicopter, but refused to launch it after they learned that Carson Helicopters, a private outfit hired by Spencer Kim, had entered the search zone. Unified command and control is vital, especially in an airborne search. Only when Carson agreed to withdraw its ‘copters from the area did the Guard send its helicopter.
It was mid-afternoon, with an hour needed to reach the search area. The Guard performed a search that afternoon. It was the only clear day during the entire time the Kims were lost, but the slanting rays of the sun and tall trees rendered the late-afternoon search virtually meaningless. The next morning, Saturday, Dec. 2, Carson Helicopters sent three aircraft into the search zone. The Guard pulled out and one local sheriff cancelled his deparment’s involvement.
That was the day James Kim left his family’s car and began moving. That day or the following day, he froze to death on the bank of the Big Windy Creek, unseen by searchers until a Carson helicopter found the body four days later. On Monday, Dec. 4, a private helicopter pilot affiliated with no one and acting on a hunch, located Mrs. Kim and her daughters.
Neither the National Guard, which had abandoned the search, nor Spencer Kim’s private contractor, had anything to do with locating the Kim survivors. Nor did the cellphone ping, which the helicopter pilot, John Rachor, was not aware of.
Many details of the events of Nov. 25-Dec. 6 are terribly misunderstood by all concerned. The national media quickly became fixed on a drama involving a vulnerable family and its heroic father. Once it was over, the family patriarch cast about in a search for someone to blame other than his son, and perhaps himself.
The danger of accepting these false accounts is that they might prompt inappropriate responses, such as abandoning financial privacy, locking up wilderness areas or demoralizing search and rescue operations that are thinly staffed and poorly funded to begin with. The death of James Kim, and the endangerment of his family, is primarily a family affair, not a government failure.
For more information, visit http://www.kimtragedy.info