“A woman found her missing husband’s body before police were able to by using the Find My iPhone app to track him to a car wreck,” Jennifer Smith reports for The Daily Mail. “Jayesh Patel, 49, failed to return to his home in Pacifica near San Francisco, California, on Friday night, prompting his wife to report his disappearance to police.”
“She tracked his cell phone to the interchange of highways 101 and 92 on Saturday where she found his body trapped inside his totaled Mercedes,” Smith reports. “Mr Patel is believed to have veered off the ramp at some point late on Friday night and fallen some 30ft in the car.”
“California Highway Patrol pried him out of the vehicle on Saturday after being called to the scene by his devastated wife,” Smith reports. “Local residents questioned why it took so long for anyone to come across the man’s body at such a busy stretch of road. Friends paid tribute to Mr Patel as a ‘family man’ and experienced colleague after hearing of his death.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: More proof that if you want something done right, do it yourself.
Our condolences to the victim’s family and friends.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
“Local residents questioned why it took so long for anyone to come across the man’s body at such a busy stretch of road.”
Sadly, in todays America, with its Smartphone no matter who manufactured, I bet there were plenty of people who came across the man’s body but for purely selfish reasons. Check for ‘selfies’ for their Instagram accounts or Live Stream on Facebook! Check places like that. To modify Obama’s American people, “That’s who we are!”
What a ridiculous assertion with no evidence on your part. And Obama had nothing to do with this. Get your own house in order, you appear to have problems.
I live near there. It is an unpopulated area with some of the ramps reaching quite high in the air. It would be easy for a car to fly into the bushes where it couldn’t be seen.
When I’m driving correctly I’m paying attention to the road ahead and roads I’m merging to or merging at me. I’m not staring off the road at the scenery or down a hill.
If the car really went down 30 ft maybe people driving properly won’t see it.
No matter how good a driver you are or any of us is, we all make mistakes and have a lapse of attention from time to time. It’s just that usually the consequences are not so severe.
I think you may have missed the point. His message wasn’t an indictment of the victim; it tried to explain why nobody could see the wreck. People who drive properly look at other traffic, rather than to the side of the highway, so even if the wreck was visible, other drivers likely wouldn’t be able to see it.
Read what @doctrsnoop said: he wasn’t criticizing the victim, he was arguing that it shouldn’t be surprising that other drivers didn’t see the victim’s car.
Sad that she did not find him alive. Makes me wonder, though, why she did not use “find my iPhone” and tell the police where his phone was located. Seems it would have saved the police some time, and maybe found him sooner.
Still, it is amazing that iPhones can help us in so many ways.
Very sad for what she is going through.
The reason why I made sure my kids all had iPhones at an early age was so I can find them, alive, and don’t have to look for a body later on.
How does iPhone protect your kids and how did iPhone fail to protect this man? What sort of deaths does iPhone offer protection? Does Apple offer an app to save one’s self from death?
It seems unlikely that she used “Find My iPhone”. More likely that the used “Find My Friends”.
So the real question is how many accidents and lives lost are caused by irresponsible use of phones while driving!
And the answer is a short google trip away:
“The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year. Nearly 330,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving. 1 out of every 4 car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving.”
Data is incomplete, as it is usually difficult to determine how big a role the phone had in the accident. The official numbers only include cases where a surviving driver admitted to phone usage, or where investigation concluded with reasonable certainty, that a phone had been a significant contributing cause. In many cases, there is no evidence, nor witnesses, and those cases are not counted as cellphone-caused fatalities.
Too bad iPhone didn’t recognize that this person was using it while driving. In this case iPhone is complicit in his death by failing to warn. Saul Goodman is preparing a class action lawsuit.