By Teresa A. Martin
Do you ever have something in the news that you follow almost against your will, that you don’t really want to know the ending to but you can’t pull always because you always hope that somehow it might end up happy?
Me too.
But it doesn’t always and this week the story I couldn’t quite pull away from ended with a heartbeat of hope, three lives saved, and a tragic conclusion.
This was the story of the Kim family who took a wrong turn in the mountains. A wrong turn sounds like a little thing, but up in the mountains it is literally the difference between life and death.
I’ve never felt safe in the mountains and driving little roads along the Front Range, near Boulder CO where I once lived was always an exercise in clenched –teeth deep-breathing fingers-crossed travel. There was a story about a snowplow that missed a curve and disappeared until spring. Once an unusual bank of fog rolled in and I remember pulling to the side of a tiny windy road that looked like every other tiny windy road and wondering if I could find a way out. Literally.
So when I read about the lost family – James Kim, 35, his wife Kati, 30, their two young daughters age 4 and 7 months - in northwest Oregon I had a flashback to that cold foggy day. And I couldn’t let go of it.
James Kim was a senior editor for CNET. CNET is the premiere technology news-site I close my eyes can still walk through the San Francisco offices. I didn’t know him, but at one time I knew the company and people there.
The trip was researched. It was mapped online. Some reports say that an error in the mapping data may have led to the wrong turn. Other reports say that vandals cut the locks off the gates that marked the road closed for the season. Have you ever followed Mapquest or Google or Yahoo maps religiously?
There were two cell phones, but the car was too far in the mountains for reception. As the car remained stuck, trapped, on the road, for a fleeting moment a signal connected and was gone, it connected just long enough to collect text messages.
CNET covered the story. The online community followed it. From within the community, two engineers at Edge Wireless LLC, working on their own, began digging through record and found the ping, found the tower it connected to and the area the phone was in. They used the data they had to create a map to calculate the most likely locations where the phone had been. One of the engineers added his experience in the backcountry to make a best guess – and it was right.
Nine days after they went missing, mother and two daughters were found, alive. James, the father, had left the car on the seventh day in a desperate attempt to find help.
At this point, one miracle of technology combined with human knowledge and determination made the first part of a happy ending possible. My spirits soared. Would the father be found too?
A commercial satellite-imagery company rerouted one of its satellites to fly over the Oregon wilderness where rescue crews were searching for Kim.
The online community continued its support and kept the story and the search alive.
But all the technology in the world couldn’t keep James Kim alive. He was found the past Wednesday, dead from hypothermia.
I so didn’t want to read the ending of this story. I wanted to write an ending where he was scooped up alive and reunited with his family and the community celebrated.
In the 48 hours since he was found, there has been time for various pundits to post theories. Was the map data faulty? Did they trust the wrong source? Should a company be liable for its map data? Should GPS be part of every car? Should signal beacon be part of cars? What is the role cell phones play in public safety?
Interesting questions all. But in the end, the thing that we will remember about the story is that for this man, a lover of technology, described as a ‘gadget geek,’ and someone who made is living from writing about it all, ended his life with the most human of all decisions – to take the risk as a husband and father to find a way to save his family.
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