In a tragic incident, an Indian couple on Tuesday fell from Yosemite National Park in the western US while taking a selfie. They fell about 800 feet below Taft Point and died on the spot. The park officials recovered their bodies and identified them as Vishnu Viswanath and Meenakshi Moorthy.
The Associated Press reported that Viswanath and Moorthy had set up a tripod near the ledge on Tuesday evening. However, the next morning, park visitors saw the camera and alerted officials who then used high-powered binoculars to find the couple and used helicopters to airlift the bodies, the report said.
Speaking to AP, Viswanath’s brother Jishnu Viswanath said that the funeral of the couple will take place in the US because the bodies were not in a condition to be flown back to India. Viswanath was a software engineer at Cisco’s San Jose, California headquarters and Moorthy wanted to work full time as a travel blogger. They both were travel-obsessed.
Both graduated from the College of Engineering in Alapuzha district of Kerala in 2010. One of their professors, Dr Nisha Kuruvilla told the AP that Moorthy and Viswanath were good students and were fond of travelling. They got married at a Hindu temple in Kerala four years ago.
According to the report, Murthy was a self-described ‘adrenaline junkie’. She had even warned daredevils who try to take selfies from dangerous heights in one post. “Did you know that wind gusts can be FATAL???” she wrote, AP reported.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Yosemite spokeswoman Jamie Richards said that park officials were probing the incident and that the investigation could take some time.