The tides are the tides, Mockingbird. Not subject to opinion. At high tide, the water would have been high enough to drown someone that was face up. I'm NOT saying I know what happened; I'm saying that SG being face up does not PRECLUDE drowning and should not be regarded as doing so. And she could have died face down and animals and/or the tide flipped her over as Dr. Tumosa said. She was out there for a very long time.
With respect to the helicopter search I fact checked it with Kolker. This was his response awhile back. The source for the helicopter story was Diaz himself.. And we are not talking a high tech helicopter with high resolution search capability. My guess would be it was a traffic helicopter or the likes. We are NOT talking FBI Black Hawks. I don't see why this is so contentious.
Lost Girls is a great piece of true crime writing - up there with In Cold Blood imho but it's not a bible and we didn't treat it as such.
And I am not in it, thank God.
"As readers of "Lost Girls" know, Hackett asserts that police used a helicopter to search for Shannan a few days after she disappeared. He is the only source explicitly referenced in the book. I know that a lot of people closely watching this case don't believe this is true. While I wasn't there myself and can't say for sure if it is true, I can say that for what it's worth, two other people say it happened, too.
1) Shannan's boyfriend Alex Diaz told me about it in a personal interview: "They [police] came like an hour later [after his first encounter with Hackett at Oak Beach], they even had a helicopter flying around the whole area. And they didn’t find nothing that day. I was shocked. I don’t know how they didn’t find her."
Now, maybe his memory is off, or maybe he is just repeating something that was just told to him by somebody at some point. But this is what he said.
2) Commissioner Richard Dormer told me the same thing: "I believe the helicopter flew over within a couple of days of her being missing. And that was very difficult, to see anything in that area. As I mentioned, everything in that area was in full bloom. It was just another tool that we could utilize just in case she was lying out there in the open."
His version is interesting to me, because it shows him both trying to demonstrate that the police were doing their job and trying to explain why they failed to find her. Convenient, maybe, but nevertheless, this is what he said." - Bob Kolker
