Trooper
William Finn, a spokesman with the Washington State Patrol, was
tweeting Wednesday under the handle @wspd5pio about an accident on
Vancouver’s Interstate 205.
A car was traveling northbound when it crossed the grass median into the southbound lane, striking a pickup truck, head on.
At 2:11 p.m. PT, Finn tweeted, “Vancouver
– SB 205 @ Padden – Fatality collision. WB Padden to SB 205 is closed.
Right lane SB 205 also closed in area. Use alt route!”
About
10 minutes earlier, Caran Johnson, a local scanner aficionado and a
follower of Finn’s on Twitter, had learned about the accident. She
turned to the micro-blogging site to post new details and to reach out
to her community.
“this accident sounds horrible,” she wrote in a tweet posted at 2:01 p.m. PT under the handle @ScanCouver.
Finn
was at the accident scene gathering information. Before him lay the
wreckage of a 2005 silver four-door Hyundai Elantra. Inside, the driver
was dead.
At 2:17 p.m. PT, Johnson posted, “I’m trying not to panic, but my husband left work early and he drives 205 to get home. he’s not answering his phone.”
Desperate
to contact her husband, or at least rule out the possibility that he
was involved in the crash, Johnson reached out to Finn, like she had
done many times before when trying to gather information about an
accident.
“I
may tweet something and she may tweet back. One night we exchanged a
recipe for a low carb pizza,” said Finn, who has never met Johnson.
At 2:20 p.m. PT, Johnson sent a tweet to Finn, “@wspd5pio do you have descriptions of involved vehicles?”
“@ScanCouver sorry. Not yet.,” Finn replied.
“It was terrible,” the spokesman told CNN later.
“Immediately,
I went into overdrive mode and I stopped tweeting the whole thing. I
didn’t want someone to find out over Twitter that their husband passed
away. I didn’t want her to
