Oregon to review search practices
GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The Oregon State Sheriff’s Association wants to know “who knew what when” in Josephine County’s search for a San Francisco family stranded more than a week deep in the Rogue River canyon.
The review was requested by Josephine County Sheriff’s Patrol Search and Rescue, a nonprofit group of volunteers who search for people missing in the backcountry, after stories in the Oregonian newspaper in Portland suggested officials in Josephine County did not make effective use of tips about what road the Kim family might have taken.
“There was concern that our standard review that we do after all significant searches was maybe subject to question. We just didn’t even want to bother looking like we were attempting to defend ourselves,” said Rural Metro Fire Department Chief Phil Turnbull, chairman of the county search and rescue executive committee.
“The sheriff’s association is the standard panel for local search and rescue to get this kind of review done,” Turnbull said.
Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger, who is overseeing the review, said sheriff’s detectives from Klamath and other counties will interview about 40 peo-ple connected with the search and hope to have a report done by Jan. 5, when a review of the state’s role in the search is due on the governor’s desk.
“We are going to provide them with an after-action report that really is who knew what when and how they learned the information or how they received the information,” said Evinger. “It’s about what went right and what they could have done better.”
“A critical point in this critique is finding out when the search came under the control of one county,” Evinger added. “Because (in the early stages) everybody thought it was theirs in a different county. A transfer of command is what we are looking at – when and how did that happen?”
James and Kati Kim and their two young daughters became lost the night of Nov. 25 while trying to drive on a backcountry route known as Bear Camp Road through the Siskiyou National Forest during a snowstorm. They were headed for a Gold Beach luxury lodge where they had reservations.
They were not reported missing for four days, and the initial search stretched more than 300 miles between Portland and Gold Beach.
After being stranded a week on a remote logging road that branches off Bear Camp Road, James Kim hiked for help on Dec. 2, but he left the road to follow a creek, where he was found dead of exposure four days later.
Two days after he had left, his wife and two young daughters were found by a local helicopter pilot who was following a hunch and not involved in the formal search. The family had hired its own helicopters to join the search.
Two Edge Wireless engineers acting on a hunch sifted cell-phone records and found a text message for the Kims had bounced off a cell-phone tower near Glendale and been received somewhere to the west of the tower. They notified authorities the night of Dec. 2.