Two people who died after falling more than 800 feet from a scenic
overlook at Yosemite
National Park in October
had alcohol in their systems and were intoxicated at the time of the incident,
according to autopsy reports.
The autopsy investigations, completed Jan. 4 by the
Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department, concluded that Meenakshi Moorthy,
30, and her husband, Vishnu Viswanath, 29 — both born in India, but living and
working in the Bay Area — died “of multiple injuries to the head, neck, chest
and abdomen, sustained by a fall from a mountain,” wrote Dr. Sung-Ook Baik, a
forensic pathologist at the Stanislaus County Coroner’s Office.
Both Moorthy and Viswanath were “intoxicated with ethyl
alcohol prior to death,” Baik stated in the documents, which contain toxicology
reports. No drugs were present in their bodies, lab tests found.
Ethyl alcohol is found in beer, wine, hard liquor and other
types of common alcoholic beverages.
Exactly how the pair fell still remains something of a
mystery.
“Any deaths that happen inside the park, the National Park
Service rangers do the investigation of the accident itself,” said Kristie
Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office, on Friday.
“As far as what led up to it, that’s done by the National Park Service.”
Most employees at Yosemite
National Park have been
off work for nearly a month due to the federal government shutdown. Calls to Yosemite public affairs staff were not returned Friday.
Mitchell noted that Stanislaus
County coroner’s officials, based in Modesto, have a contract to perform autopsies in
fatalities that occur in Mariposa County, a rural county that includes Yosemite Valley.
How intoxicated the couple were is unclear. Andrea Stewart,
assistant Mariposa
County coroner, said
Friday in an email that “we can only conclude that they had consumed alcohol
but it is unknown to what level of intoxication.”
Moorthy and Viswanath’s death drew international attention.
He was a young engineer described as brilliant by his friends and former instructors.
He had recently taken a job at Cisco Systems in San Jose.
The couple, who married in 2014 in Guruvayoor, Kerala, India,
graduated with degrees in computer science and engineering from a school in
South India, the College
of Engineering,
Chengannur, where they met.
After moving to the United States, she worked as an
outgoing social media blogger, with more than 25,000 Instagram followers. She
wrote about the couple’s adventures in national parks across the West and in
scenic destinations all over the world.
Yosemite officials said the pair fell on Oct. 25 from Taft
Point, a scenic overlook 3,500 feet above Yosemite
Valley.
The bodies of the couple were found about 800 feet down the side of
a steep cliff from Taft Point, which is located near the end of Glacier Point Road
and has sweeping views of Yosemite Valley, El Capitan and Yosemite Falls.
Park officials said a photo tripod was set up near the edge of the cliff from
where they are believed to have fallen. Rangers hiked and rappelled down
the cliff to recover their bodies, with the help of a helicopter from the
California Highway Patrol.
“We still don’t have any clear idea exactly what happened,”
Jamie Richards, a Yosemite spokeswoman said
several days afterward. “We are still trying to piece it together.”
മുന് റിപ്പോര്ട്ടുകള് കാണുക
ഒരു ഫോട്ടോയുടെ വിലയേയുള്ളോ നിങ്ങളുടെ ജീവിതത്തിന്'