United States- woman unknowingly live-tweets hubby's death
(CNN) -- Trooper William Finn, a spokesman with the Washington State Patrol, was tweeting Wednesday under the handle @wspd5pio about an accident on Vancouver's Interstate 205.
A car was traveling northbound when it crossed the grass median into the southbound lane, striking a pickup truck, head on.
At 2:11 p.m. PT, Finn
tweeted, "Vancouver - SB 205 @ Padden - Fatality collision. WB Padden to
SB 205 is closed. Right lane SB 205 also closed in area. Use alt
route!"
About 10 minutes earlier,
Caran Johnson, a local scanner aficionado and a follower of Finn's on
Twitter, had learned about the accident. She turned to the
micro-blogging site to post new details and to reach out to her
community.
"this accident sounds horrible," she wrote in a tweet posted at 2:01 p.m. PT under the handle @ScanCouver.
Finn was at the accident
scene gathering information. Before him lay the wreckage of a 2005
silver four-door Hyundai Elantra. Inside, the driver was dead.
At 2:17 p.m. PT, Johnson
posted, "I'm trying not to panic, but my husband left work early and he
drives 205 to get home. he's not answering his phone."
Desperate to contact her
husband, or at least rule out the possibility that he was involved in
the crash, Johnson reached out to Finn, like she had done many times
before when trying to gather information about an accident.
"I may tweet something
and she may tweet back. One night we exchanged a recipe for a low carb
pizza," said Finn, who has never met Johnson.
At 2:20 p.m. PT, Johnson sent a tweet to Finn, "@wspd5pio do you have descriptions of involved vehicles?"
"@ScanCouver sorry. Not yet.," Finn replied.
"It was terrible," the spokesman told CNN later.
"Immediately, I went
into overdrive mode and I stopped tweeting the whole thing. I didn't
want someone to find out over Twitter that their husband passed away. I
didn't want her to find out that way. That is a hard thing to go
through," he said.
Finn would normally tweet a photo of the crash scene.
"I didn't put a picture on Twitter just in case that was her husband," he said.
At 3:50 p.m. PT, Johnson's tweet confirmed her fears.
"it's him. he died," she posted for the world to read.
Johnson's husband, Craig, was the only fatality in the accident. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
A woman driving a second
car involved in the incident was taken to a hospital with serious
injuries, a broken femur and a collapsed lung.
"I feel terrible. I
still feel terrible," Finn said. "Our hearts go out to the family. This
person was a member of our community and we just lost him."
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