[LA Times] A Bay Area couple who died after falling from a popular overlook at Yosemite National Park were intoxicated at the time, according to autopsy reports.
Vishnu Viswanath, 29, and his wife, Meenakshi Moorthy, 30, died Oct. 25 after plunging about 800 feet from Taft Point, park officials said. The husband and wife were citizens of India who were living in the U.S.
The couple died of "multiple injuries to the head, neck, chest and abdomen, sustained by a fall from a mountain," Dr. Sung-Ook Baik, a forensic pathologist in the Stanislaus County Coroner’s Office, wrote in his Jan. 4 report, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Viswanath and Moorthy were "intoxicated with ethyl alcohol prior to death," Baik said in the document, which included toxicology reports. Ethyl alcohol is found in beer, wine and hard liquor.
The sheriff’s department is still investigating how the pair fell.
At about .5 terminal velocity. Why do you ask ?
Viswanath’s brother, Jishnu Viswanath, told the Associated Press at the time that the couple had set up a tripod-mounted camera near the ledge of Taft Point on the evening of Oct. 23.
Park visitors saw the camera the next morning and alerted rangers, who "used high-powered binoculars to find them and used helicopters to airlift the bodies," he said.
In March, Moorthy posted a photo of herself on Instagram, sitting on a cliff at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in a shirt that said "Sunset Chaser." In the caption, she wrote about the dangers of taking dramatic, high-risk photos for likes on social media. |