Wife unknowingly tweets hubby's death- 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. Opinion: The new pandemic -- road deaths "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 find out
that way. That is a hard thing to go through," he
said. Finn would normally tweet a photo of the crash
scene. "I didn't put a picture on Twitter just in case that
was her husband," he said. At 3:50 p.m. PT, Johnson's tweet confirmed her
fears. "it's him. he died," she posted for the world to
read. Johnson's husband, Craig, was the only fatality in
the accident. The cause of the crash is under
investigation. A woman driving a second car involved in the
incident was taken to a hospital with serious
injuries, a broken femur and a collapsed lung. "I feel terrible. I still feel terrible," Finn said. "Our
hearts go out to the family. This person was a
member of our community and we just lost him.