Hang-glider pilot stays in custody
Authorities wait for man accused of swallowing evidence to produce card
A hang-gliding pilot whose tandem passenger plunged to her death will remain in custody with the hope that he can produce evidence related to the fatal flight.
William Johnathan Orders, 50, is charged with obstruction of justice. He appeared briefly in B.C. Provincial Court in Chilliwack on Wednesday. Dressed in street clothes — jeans and a green polo shirt — Orders kept his back to the public gallery.
He consented to remain in custody and his bail hearing was put over to Friday.
According to court documents, Orders allegedly swallowed a video memory card after 27-yearold Lenami Godinez-avila fell 300 metres to her death following takeoff from Mt. Woodside, near Agassiz, on Saturday. Orders has been held by Upper Fraser Valley RCMP since that day.
“We have confirmed that the memory card is still inside,” RCMP spokeswoman Cpl. Tammy Hollingsworth said Wednesday. She said X-rays were performed at Chilliwack General Hospital.
Hollingsworth wouldn’t comment on what methods, if any, are being used to speed recovery of the memory card, which may contain video of the accident.
“That’s just something we’re going to have to wait on,” she said.
Defence lawyer Larry Cruickshank said outside court that his client is co-operating fully with police.
Orders is the owner and operator of Vancouver Hang Gliding and is a 16-year flying veteran. He has been a certified tandem instructor since 2009. The Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association of Canada has reportedly temporarily suspended his membership.
Whether any data on the ingested smart card can be salvaged will depend on how badly digestive acids and body salts have corroded the device, explained BCIT forensics expert Dave Mckay, co-ordinator for the Institute’s Forensic Science and Technology degree program.
“The nice thing about the storage cards that were probably used . . . is that they don’t have a lot of moving parts, like a memory drive, so there is less likelihood of mechanical destruction that would void recovery of any information from the card itself,” said Mckay, who also served as a civilian RCMP forensic investigator from 2003 to 2008, specializing in video forensics.
Mckay explained that smart cards use a very stable form of non-volatile storage, a plus for investigators hoping to reclaim data. But working against them is the possibility of corrosion.
“On a lot of the cards, the interface of the devices uses little copper strips, so there could be a concern based on the human body, how acidic it is, and how much salt there would be in their system, because that could corrode the card and cause a lot of damage,” the BCIT instructor said.
Even so, a damaged card could still yield some data, he stressed.
“It’s not an all or nothing thing. The data is stored on individual memory cells, so you could have a few cells that are completely corrupt, but could still have other cells that you could recover information from.”