Selfie to blame for couple’s Yosemite death
An Indian husband and wife who fell to their deaths from a popular overlook at Yosemite National Park in the western U.S. were apparently taking a selfie, the man’s brother said yesterday.
Park rangers recovered the bodies of 29-year-old Vishnu Viswanath and 30-year-old Meenakshi Moorthy on Thursday about 800 feet below Taft Point, where visitors can walk to the edge of a vertigo-inducing granite ledge that doesn’t have a railing.
Viswanath, who Cisco India said was a software engineer at the company’s San Jose, Calif., headquarters, and Moorthy had set up their tripod near the ledge Oct. 23, Viswanath’s brother, Jishnu Viswanath, told The Associated Press.
Park visitors the next morning saw the camera and alerted rangers, who “used high-powered binoculars to find them and used helicopters to airlift the bodies,” he said.
In an eerie coincidence, a man who had hiked to the same spot with his girlfriend captured pictures of Meenakshi prior to her fall, saying she accidentally appears in the background of two of their selfie photos.
Sean Matteson said Meenakshi stood out from the crowd enjoying the sunset atop Taft Point last week because her hair was dyed bright pink and that she made him a little nervous because he felt she was standing too close to the edge.
“She was very close to the edge, but it looked like she was enjoying herself,” said Matteson, who lives in Oakland, Calif. “She gave me the willies. There aren’t any railings. I was not about to get that close to the edge. But she seemed comfortable. She didn’t seem like she was in distress or anything.”
Matteson said Moorthy’s pink-haired visage appears in the background of two selfie photos he snapped of himself and his girlfriend, Drea Rose Laguillo.
He said Laguillo noticed that Moorthy had been captured in their images on Monday after pictures of the two victims were published.
Matteson said he doesn’t recall noticing Viswanath when he and his girlfriend were at the overlook with less than a dozen other tourists.
The couple left the overlook as darkness was approaching, Matteson said.
The Indian couple’s funeral will take place in the U.S., Jishnu Viswanath said.