The Korean press reports that the family killed in the F/A-18 crash in San Diego was Korean.
More precisely, it killed a mother and her two young children. The grandmother, who came from Korea last month to help her daughter after she gave birth, is missing.
An official at the Korean consulate in LA said the mother and grandmother were Korean nationals, while the children were US citizens. The mother came to the US two years ago and worked as a nurse. Her husband, who was out of the house at the time of the accident, appears to be a Korean-American.
The pilot, meanwhile, ejected and is in stable condition.
Condolences go out to the relatives, especially the husband, to whom I wouldn’t even begin to know what to say.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Sad news. This guy had a narrow escape:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/jet-came-straight-at-me-aussie/2008/12/09/1228584815566.html
Ona completely unrelated note, thought this might interest you Marmot:
http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01100&num=4348
Grade-A toadying.
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I’m from San Diego and my wife is Korean, so this is obviously an unavoidable topic when I get home tonight.
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There really are no words to express the sorrow when something like this happens…my sympathies to the family.
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Simply bad luck. What are your odds that a jet would fall out of the sky and then smash into your house? You have a better chance of winning the multi million dollar lottery than this.
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Sad and regrettable but this kind of story was just a matter of time. When Miramar was first built and even up until 10 years ago, there was nothing in the area. I mean NOTHING. We used to go to the air shows as kids and it was like driving from Vegas out there. In the past decade, esp the last 5 years, SO MANY houses were built up in that area, along with a new highway. I think fewer jets are run out of there now that its a Marine station than when it was the Naval Air Station and home of Topgun, but still… only a matter of time.
The F-18, as far as I know, has a great service record but Murphy’s Law was bound to catch up to one of them.
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This is a real tragedy. My condolences to the family.
I have a sincere and tangentially relevant question. Would Korean people expect me, an American, to apologize to them for this accident? Would they find it odd and inappropriate if I apologized?
As I’m sure some of you can guess, I’m remembering the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, when numerous Koreans apologized to me.
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If you were foreigner from a small country, let’s say, Ireland, and you had a small community of immigrants in Korea doing their best to make a better lives and names for themselves in Korea, and, let’s say, some Irish pilot killed not merely 3 or 4 but 33 or 34 people — with a gun — then apologizing for something that someone from your small, tight-knit community has done wouldn’t make bad sense. I wouldn’t expect it, but I would understand an apology then.
It all depends it seems on the nature of who you are and your fellow countrymen are in a foreign country, the nature of how well known or not well known, tangential or so, your country is relative to the other, and other circumstances that determine whether making an apology makes for a good gesture or a totally unneccesary one.
In this case, America being such a vast country and the tragic victims here being in America — no apology would be neccesary.
Remember China Olympics? Imagine if Korea held the Summer Olympics and some xenophobic goon had killed some American tourists- relaitives of an Olympian, no less- as had happened in China this year, imagine this place then.
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The aircraft went down less than a block from a large vacant section of town. An investigation must determine if the pilot ejected too early. It must also reveal whether returning to Miramar with a malfunctioning engine was a prudent choice when considering the dangers presented to the civilian populace. At the least, the base commander and the air unit commander must personally express the government’s apology to the survivor.
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I think perhaps you mean to say that the husband should receive “condolences”, rather than an “apology”.
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And here’s a pilot who tried to miss some houses on 5 December, but didn’t have time to eject:
http://www.kommersant.com/p-13704/MiG-29_crash/
A criminal investigation has been opened.
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Where are pilot’s great-grandparents from?
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What a tragedy. What are the odds of a plane crashing on a house. And what are the odds of that house having a Korean family in it. I can’t believe this happened. Shouldn’t plane crashes be frowned upon after the 9/11 incident. It is a completetly different scenario but why do planes constantly crash? Maybe we should look into safer airplane regulations.
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Airplanes _dont_ crash that often. That’s why it’s national news when something like this happens. If Mr. Yoon’s family had been struck and killed by a drunk driver (far more likely) it would not have been national news.
It would be more accurate to say that automobiles “constantly crash”.
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