Gate on Road Kim's Took Was Never Locked this Winter [View All]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/12/13/national/a204640S46.DTL

A gate on a logging road that a San Francisco man drove down before getting lost and dying of exposure was never locked and was not broken open by vandals as was first thought, authorities said Wednesday.

James Kim, 35, was found dead in a mountain creek Dec. 6, two days after his wife and the couple's two daughters were rescued from the car, which had gotten stuck in the snow.

The federal Bureau of Land Management previously said that the gate to the logging path off Bear Camp Road should have been locked since Nov. 1, but that someone broke the lock and left the gate open. The bureau reversed itself Wednesday.

"We can find no evidence it was ever locked, nor was it vandalized," said Jody Weil, director of public affairs for BLM's Oregon office in Portland. "What had happened is that our engineer and supervisor had asked his folks to close it and assumed it had gotten done, and it had not gotten locked."

Bureau staff members who went to lock the gate could not confirm whether anybody had traveled down that road recently, and they did not want to lock anyone in, Weil said.