A FAMILYS TRAGEDY / Fumbles, missteps hindered search / Father hiked 16 miles in effort to save family

Fourteen Days Lost. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard Fourteen Days Lost. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard Photo: John Blanchard Photo: John Blanchard Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close A FAMILYS TRAGEDY / Fumbles, missteps hindered search / Father hiked 16 miles in effort to save family 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

For four days, as the snowbound Kim family's food supplies dwindled and they used up their gas running their stranded car's heater, no one even knew they were missing.

[Podcast: Remembering James Kim, a frequent guest and podcast contributor.]

It was two more days before rescuers narrowed the search to roads leading across thousands of square miles of western Oregon, and another day before cell phone transmissions helped to pinpoint the search area.

While the speed of the investigation in some ways was remarkable -- given what little authorities started out with -- it was dogged by early missteps and obstacles that handicapped investigators.

A Portland hotel where the family had stayed refused to provide credit card records that might have indicated which way the Kims had gone. An early search by air and land of the treacherous mountain route that James and Kati Kim drove out of Grants Pass yielded nothing.

The owner of a lodge on the road where the Kims' car was stuck had told authorities three days before Kati Kim and her daughters were found that he had seen tire tracks in the snow, but he hadn't been able to follow them in his snowmobile once he hit bare ground. No one followed up.

Finally, cellular phone clues -- gathered by a company engineer who volunteered his time -- helped searchers with seven state and federal agencies and crews with three helicopters hired by the family converge on the right area.

Still, their efforts came up short. In the end, it was an amateur helicopter pilot who had nothing to do with the official search who saved Kati Kim and her young daughters. He went up because he had a hunch, and because a newspaper picture of the girls reminded him of his own grandkids.

And even his efforts, and those of more than 100 people who took part in the search for James Kim once they knew where to look, weren't enough to save the San Francisco resident. Investigators now believe he probably died the day his wife and children were found. He had trekked more than 16 miles through the wilderness to try and save them -- 6 miles more than officials originally thought before realizing they'd made a mapping error.

Early efforts

James Kim, 35, an editor with San Francisco's Cnet, and his wife, Kati, 30, who had once worked for the technology Web site, set off for a Thanksgiving vacation in their 2005 Saab station wagon on Nov. 17 with their daughters, 4-year-old Penelope and 7-month-old Sabine.

The couple, who also owned a boutique in the Haight and an apothecary in Noe Valley near their home, stayed in Seattle, then spent the night of Nov. 24 in Portland. The plan the next day was to go to Gold Beach, on the coast 29 miles north of the California border, and then stop in Mendocino before driving home Nov. 27.

As the world now knows, they became stranded in the snow west of Grants Pass before they ever got to the coast. But at the time, no one was expecting to hear from them, so no one knew they were missing.

On Nov. 28, the day after they were due back, the couple missed several appointments. By the afternoon of Nov. 29, with no word from the family, their house-sitter reported them missing to San Francisco police.

By then, the Kims had already been lost for four days.

Detective Mike Weinstein of the Portland police missing persons detail was out sick Nov. 29 and wasn't able to start work on the call he had gotten from San Francisco police until Thursday, Nov. 30.

The agencies divided up responsibilities. San Francisco police Inspector Angela Martin would check cellular records and financial records, and Weinstein would try to retrace the family's steps in his state.

Meanwhile, Eva Kim, James Kim's sister, started her own investigation. She knew that a friend of the Kims' in Portland had told police where the family had been going, so she called every hotel in Gold Beach on Nov. 30.

Finally she found Terri Stone, the innkeeper of Tu Tu Tun Lodge. Stone told her the family had reservations for Nov. 25 and had called her that day asking that she leave the key out. That call came at 5:45 p.m. after the Kims had left Salem, more than 200 miles to the north.

The information was critical, Weinstein said. "It told us we needed to move immediately, because more likely than not they were in our state."

San Francisco police also notified the public of the missing family, and a hot line was created to field tips. The first stories appeared in the media that night.

An early obstacle

That first day, Weinstein's investigation focused on retracing the family's route in the state. To do that, he wanted to know what credit cards the family had been using and where.

He soon found the hotel in Portland where the Kims had stayed Nov. 24 and sent a request on police letterhead for credit-card information. Logically, the Kims might have continued to use whatever card they used at the hotel as they made their way through Oregon, and that could provide a trail for investigators.

But the hotel manager -- on orders from corporate headquarters -- would not cooperate, citing privacy concerns for their guests. Weinstein, who wouldn't identify the hotel, said it was a first in his experience.

"To their credit, I could tell the manager truly wanted to help me, but he was ordered not to provide the information," Weinstein said.

At 4 p.m., Weinstein issued a bulletin statewide telling law enforcement to watch for the family's silver station wagon, with special attention to Interstate 5, Highway 101 on the coast and the routes connecting them. The bulletin said they had been going to Gold Beach.

"We believed they must have run into trouble somewhere along the way," Weinstein said. "We just didn't know where it was."

Bear Camp Road

The morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Lt. Dennis Dinsmore of the Curry County Sheriff's Department, whose area encompasses Gold Beach, came to work and learned that all of Oregon was to be on the lookout for the missing family.

"I saw the destination was Gold Beach -- that's our county seat -- but their last contact was Salem, 250 miles away," Curry said. "It's pretty difficult to know where to start."

Still, given all the roads the family could have taken -- there are five state routes and two U.S. highways leading over to the coast from central and southern Oregon, and countless back ways -- there was one Dinsmore knew well: Bear Camp Road.

The way to Bear Camp Road starts off I-5 just north of Grants Pass. At first it's a two-lane country road called the Merlin-Galice Road, but as it climbs into the Coast Range over peaks as high as 4,000 feet, it gets steep and narrow. In places, the dividing line disappears. During winter, the locals typically won't even try it without a four-wheel drive.

On some maps, however, Bear Camp looks benign. The paper map the Kims are believed to have been using shows it as a major route, and gives no indication of its wintertime dangers.

"We've had tragedies on there before," Dinsmore said. "We have had people die up there before."

He recalled the 1994 case of a man who got stuck in the snow near Bear Camp Road and kept a diary for 52 days. The man starved to death before anyone found him.

Dinsmore also remembered there had been a storm in southern Oregon the night the Kims were on the road. He called Sara Rubrecht, the emergency services coordinator with neighboring Josephine County, which encompasses the area around I-5 and Grants Pass.

"It's a horrible route, even at best," Dinsmore said. "I talked to Sara and said, 'We need to clear Bear Camp.' "

Sheriff's deputies headed up the road from both Gold Beach and Grants Pass. Curry County sent two deputies at 10 a.m. Friday from the hamlet of Agness in a four-wheel-drive truck. "They were told to drive as far up Bear Camp Road as they could, safely," Dinsmore said.

The truck could make it only 7 1/2 miles up the mountain, well short of the crest. "They kept going until they encountered snow and a solid sheet of ice," Dinsmore said.

From Grants Pass, Rubrecht told him her crews with the Josephine County Sheriff's Department had made it 18 miles before the road became impassable.

Later, it would become plain that the deputies from Josephine County had gone 6 miles past a fork in the road where James Kim, struggling along in the snow at night, had turned the Saab the wrong way and headed into a maze of old logging roads around the Rogue River. There was supposed to be a gate blocking the wrong route, but someone had come along in November and cut the lock.

That Friday morning, John James, the owner of Black Bar Lodge on the Rogue River, got an e-mail from an employee who had read about the missing family. The subject heading read, "Whattaya bet they are up on Bear Camp?"

James said he had redirected "countless" motorists over the years who had strayed off of Bear Camp onto the logging road that leads to his lodge and loops around. "I just had this feeling that they may be out there somewhere," he said.

He left a message with Rubrecht, but she didn't call back. He and his brother went out in their snowmobiles, but it hadn't snowed for a few days and they soon hit bare ground. Before that, however, they could see fresh tire tracks that had been snowed over recently.

Later that day, he ran into Rubrecht and a deputy on Bear Camp Road. He says he told her that someone needed to check the logging roads thoroughly, but "to be honest, they weren't in a listening mode." Rubrecht did not return calls for comment.

With no searchers having driven about 30 miles of Bear Camp Road, Dinsmore called for a helicopter from the state Office of Emergency Management. A Blackhawk military helicopter was dispatched from Salem.

"That took a while," Dinsmore said. "Sara and I determined we were going to clear the road by air. There are stretches of road where there's heavy tree cover and it's hard to see from the air. Sara indicated they would have a Sno-Cat clear the entire length."

The helicopter went up late Friday afternoon, came back to Gold Beach at 5:30 p.m. to refuel and searched again until midnight. There was no sign of the Kims. Eventually, Dinsmore believed, Sno-Cat vehicles were able to make it through the entire road.

"We had cleared Bear Camp," Dinsmore said. "We cleared it as far as people could travel in wheeled vehicles and then with helicopter flyover into the nighttime hours."

Tips, and a cell-phone hit

Back in Portland, Weinstein and his colleagues were sifting through more than 100 tips that had come in regarding the Kims. One of them was from Taryn Cardenas of Beaverton, who remembered seeing them going into a Denny's in the central Oregon town of Roseburg the evening of Nov. 25.

It took several hours, but by later Friday night Weinstein had talked to the waitress who served the Kims.

"This was critical, because at that point we had people searching all the major highways," Weinstein said. The new information meant the 100 miles between Salem and Roseburg could be eliminated.

But "that still puts them 140 miles from Gold Beach," Dinsmore noted. "It narrowed it from 250 miles of road down a lesser distance, but there were some major highways."

On Saturday, Dec. 2, Weinstein labored over the case for 14 hours from home. By this time he was working in conjunction with four private investigators and an attorney James Kim's family had hired.

"They were out there, attempting to gather information that the police don't necessarily have access to," Weinstein said. "Then they would relay that to us. It really was very much a cooperative effort to make this all come together. It enabled us to work more efficiently, much more quickly."

The family had also hired private helicopters, which first went up Saturday. Dinsmore said he had a discussion with Kim's father, Spencer Kim, who rode in one of the choppers during the search.

At 6 p.m., Weinstein got a message that Medford police had been contacted by Eric Fuqua, a cell phone company engineer who was "adamant" that he had to talk to someone about the case.

Fuqua worked for Edge Wireless of Bend, Ore., which is affiliated with Cingular, the carrier that the Kim family used. Weinstein said Fuqua had taken it upon himself to contact the family through a Web site that had been created and had obtained the missing couple's cell phone numbers.

"They told us they had two very brief hits with one of the cell phones," Weinstein said. The calls were made from a 26-mile radius surrounding Glendale, a small town 21 miles north of Grants Pass, and came within four seconds of each other at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 26.

The information was passed along to David Steele, a detective with the Oregon State Police in Salem who was working on the case.

"I took a look at it, and (the location suggested by the transmissions) was right on Bear Camp Road, right at the top," Steele said. "Either they were receiving a call or trying to use it."

Authorities now were almost sure the Kims were somewhere off the road between Grants Pass and Gold Beach. It was a week almost to the hour since the Kims had become stranded, and about 12 hours after James Kim had left his family on foot to look for help.

Saturday morning, John Rachor was driving on the way to cut a Christmas tree 70 miles east of Medford when his wife read him a story about the Kims from the Medford Mail Tribune. There was a picture of the couple's daughters, Penelope and Sabine; they reminded Rachor of his grandchildren, a boy and girl about the same age. He also noticed Kati Kim's name; his daughter is named Katie.

"I thought about turning around right then (and starting to search), but they had this plan, so I stayed along," he said. Instead, he went up Sunday in his helicopter, a flame-emblazoned chopper he uses to commute to the eight Burger Kings he owns and a home he has in Agness.

The newspaper story said the Kims had eaten in Roseburg and were supposed to have gone to Gold Beach. Rachor figured that they might have headed over Bear Camp Road and made a wrong turn at that logging road. A lot of people did.

"I thought they had looked there," he said, "but when I got there, I found they hadn't checked it."

After 2 1/2 hours in the air, he saw tire tracks in the snow along one road but was running low on fuel so he turned back.

Searchers from Jackson County were looking that day in the same area. Sheriff's Lt. Pat Rowland said his crews asked about the back logging road, but were told -- incorrectly -- that the owner of the Black Bar Lodge had "cleared" it himself.

On Monday, Rachor flew over the same road again and saw there was only the one set of tire tracks; it didn't look like whoever it was had driven out.

He also saw human footprints, and radioed the find to other searchers. He went back to Grants Pass to refuel, returned to the road, and 5 miles from where he'd seen the prints he saw Kati Kim, running around and waving an umbrella.

A disappointing end

The joy of finding Kati Kim and her two daughters alive quickly took a disturbing turn when she told rescue workers that her husband had taken off two days earlier to find help. Temperatures had dipped below freezing both nights, so there wasn't much time.

James Kim's footprints showed he had backtracked along the road 5 miles until the trail turned into the brush leading toward Big Windy Creek.

Mountain rescue teams from Eugene and Lane County were called in. By the end of Monday, 100 people were searching on the ground and in the air, and that night an Air National Guard helicopter equipped with infrared heat sensors detected two "hot spots" in the canyon along the creek.

By Tuesday morning, 26 specialists in wilderness search and rescue operations were attempting to bushwhack their way through the forest to reach the hot spots. It was clear by now that Kim's situation was, at best, dire. Rescue workers following his trail were soaked from dripping trees, brush and snow before they even reached the creek. Once they got to the creek, it was a treacherous slog over slippery rocks. Progress in some places was impossible without actually getting into the water.

On Wednesday morning a man was lowered 200 feet from a helicopter into the creek gully where he found three shirts, one wool sock, a blue girl's skirt and what might have been a makeshift pad where Kim might have slept. The items, and a pair of pants found the day before, might have been a trail Kim was leaving for searchers.

Kim had disappeared Nov. 25 without anyone knowing it, but by now millions were following the search on national television. A satellite was rerouted over the area to try to find him, and a cell phone tower was constructed to help with communications.

Spencer Kim had already spent thousands of dollars a day for private search helicopters, and his family put together 18 plastic bags of survival gear to be dropped Wednesday over a 3-mile section of wilderness. The packages included a heartfelt letter from a frightened father. It was a letter his son would never get a chance to read.

It was 33 degrees and fog had just lifted at 12:03 p.m. Wednesday when a pilot with Carson Helicopters spotted what looked like a person lying on his back in the creek.

The pilot called it in and another helicopter lowered two Jackson County SWAT team members down to investigate. It was Kim.

Dr. James Olson, the deputy state medical examiner for southwest Oregon, said Kim had probably collapsed in the creek and succumbed to hypothermia.

There was no way to pinpoint the time of death. But at most, Kim probably survived two days, Olson said. By the time his wife and children were found, chances are he was gone.

"He was soaked and there was no way to warm himself," Olson said. "He was not only starving, but he had gone through an exhausting ordeal. People in this situation can't last for more than a day or so."

Had searchers found the car over the weekend, they might have been able to save Kim, Rowland said.

But "it was a hard search," he said. "It was rough terrain. If anybody saw the terrain, it was a needle in a haystack."

FOURTEEN DAYS LOST

- Mileage

Route of car traveled on logging road BLM 34-8-36: 21.3 miles

James Kim's hike out on road: 11.5 miles

James Kim's hike down Big Windy Creek ravine: 4.7 miles

Total miles walked by James Kim: 16.2 miles

Distance to Black Bar Lodge from car (straight line): 3 miles

Elevation

1 Opened gate entrance to BLM 34-8-36: 3,650 feet

2 Kims' stranded car: 2,438 feet

6 James Kim's body at Big Windy Creek: 661 feet

November 23

Thanksgiving

James Kim, 35, an editor with San Francisco's Cnet, and his wife, Kati, 30, and their daughters Penelope, 4, and 7-month-old Sabine, spending Thanksgiving in Seattle.

November 24

Journey home

The family has brunch with a friend and spends the night at a hotel in Portland. The plan is to drive to Gold Beach on the Oregon coast the next day and then stop in Mendocino before driving home Nov. 27.

November 25

Wrong turn

After dinner in Roseburg, the family misses the turnoff on Interstate 5 for state Highway 42 and uses a road map to find Bear Camp Road out of Grants Pass. They take a wrong turn on a logging road during a snowstorm and spend the night in the car.

November 26

Lost and cold

The Kims huddle together, trapped in their car as snow continues to fall.

November 27

The cold, icy weather continues, forcing the family to run the car heater to keep warm.

November 28

Friends, family begin to wonder

The couple miss several appointments, and family and friends begin to worry.

November 29

The Kims' house-sitter reports them missing. Still stranded, the family collects wood and attempts to build a fire.

November 30

While the Kims burn their spare tire, the Portland and San Francisco police begin retracing the family's steps. James Kim's sister, Eva Kim, discovers that the family missed their Nov. 25 reservation at the Tu Tu Tun Lodge in Gold Beach.

December 1

Searching

The family burns all four tires from the car. Curry County and Josephine County police drive up Bear Camp Road, but a big section is blocked by snow. A helicopter flies nearby, but the fire has gone out.

December 2

Cell phone "pings"

James Kim leaves to go find help. His father hires three private helicopters and, that night, cell phone "pings" are discovered, narrowing the search grid.

December 3

Intensive search focusing on Bear Camp Road begins.

December 4

Wife, kids found

Acting on a hunch, businessman John Rachor uses his helicopter to search back roads and discovers Kati Kim and the children. They are rescued. James Kim's footprints are tracked to the Big Windy Creek ravine.

December 5

Clothing found

James Kim's discarded clothes are found. Searchers theorize he was trying to indicate to rescuers which way he had gone.

December 6

James found

The body of James Kim is found lying in 2 feet of water, a half mile from where the creek meets the Rogue River.

John Blanchard / The Chronicle