Trooper William Finn, a spokesman with the Washington State Patrol, has spoken of his horror that one of his Twitter followers inadvertently started live tweeting details from him about her own husband’s death.
“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.”
Will and Caran Johnson often corresponded over Twitter, they once even exchanged a recipe for low-carb pizza. Caran often listened to police scanners in her home town of Vancouver, Washington and followed Will’s feed. She was at home yesterday afternoon when she began commenting on an accident on a busy road near her home.
Will was at an accident scene gathering information. Before him lay the wreckage of a 2005 silver four-door Hyundai Elantra. Inside, the driver was dead.
He started reporting on the accident via Twitter and Caran joined in under her Twitter handle @scancouver. She had no idea her husband Craig was the victim and neither did Will.
Craig had left work earlier that day feeling faint and his colleagues had been worried about him driving home. Minutes later he was involved in an accident when a car driving northbound crossed into the grass median strip into the southbound lane and hit a pickup truck head on. He died and the woman in the other vehicle was taken to hospital in a serious condition.
At first Caran commented on the traffic, the conditions on the road and then she became concerned. Her husband should have arrived home by now. That's when it clicked for Trooper Finn that there might be a connection.
"Immediately, I went into overdrive mode and I stopped tweeting the whole thing," he said. "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 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.
She used Twitter to ask authorities to help her locate her husband. Her rising panic is palpable.
Hours after her first tweet mentioning a nearby accident, the terrible truth was revealed to Caran.
She was later inundated with condolence messages:
Caran thanked everyone for their prayers and thoughts then sent a final tweet later that night saying: "My boys are finally asleep. I feel like a block of cement fell on me."
Caran's live-tweeting was well known in her community and even became the subject of a story on her Twitter feed by the Associated Press in January.
"I just have some kind of fascination of listening in to the secret world of the scanner that not everyone gets to hear," said Johnson.
"It gets kind of depressing ... I try and maintain a positive attitude."
To send your condolences click here. Also, an online fundraiser has been organised for the Johnson family by her followers.
Has social media ever helped you in a time of need?