A friend of mine, a guy I dated back in my teens, posted this on his FB page the other day. Talk about a creepy vacation. I attached the picture he mentions on the bottom.
Hiked Half Dome and ended up a murder suspect... No, I'm not even kidding. Ok, this is kind of a long story, but worth telling since a few of you have heard part of it. If you look at the pictures of my trip to Yosemite last weekend you'...ll see that my buddy Tom and I ended up on Half Dome in the middle of the night (about 5 AM) before sunrise and prior to making the 3 hour hike back to "civilization" (aka the Curry Village camping area) at about 7 AM. When we got back there was a park ranger waiting to question us because we were the first two to make the hike back from half dome. We were asked if we knew anything about a death there earlier that morning... We had no idea and when we left everything seemed fine. BUT, if you look in the attached picture you'll see that there's a guy in the back left of the picture on the phone. We explained to the ranger that we saw only one person who was alone and that he was by himself on the phone, which is a little strange considering most people don't hike all that way there just to talk on the phone. A special agent soon contacted us to get copies of all of our pictures because we were the only people they could talk to since half dome is so remote. We were told that they believed the guy committed suicide, but that they had to investigate it as a homicide first. AND since Tom and I were the only other two in the area (check my album, the picture I took of where we slept is only about 20 feet away from where the body was found after we left) we had to be "ruled out as suspects". When they called up to the park official who had made their way to scene the clothing description matched that of the guy on the phone, so everyone believed that he was the victim. After getting copies of the pictures on my camera of me on the diving board (like my profile picture and the one that is attached) we were allowed to leave. Tom and I are back at my apartment in San Francisco when I talk to the lead investigator again. He thanks me for the pictures again because he says that they were able to figure out that the guy on the phone was actually NOT the victim and that because my pictures are time stamped they realized that the victim had taken his own life before anyone got to the top of half dome that night. (Which explained why nobody up there had heard a gunshot) He told me to look at my pictures again and directed me to the attached photo and the feet in the lower left of the picture... The man took his own life in the middle of the night and likely thought he would fall over the edge. Tom and I slept just feet away and had actually walked over that area looking for the best place to sleep on the side of the rock (the east side so that the sunrise would wake us up) Nobody noticed anything until about 20 mins after we left because the light level was still relatively low (the camera is picking up a lot more light than our eyes could at that hour) Anyway, there were never any charges, but Tommy and I were the lead suspects for a few hours until they could prove it was suicide. Creepy, no?
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