Posted on 10/05/2016 7:43:41 AM PDT by jerod
American media has been swarming for interviews with the captain of a freighter docked in Saint John, after his crew performed a stunning rescue more than 200 kilometres off Cape Cod.
"I decided it must be trouble," said Capt. Zhao Hengdong, waving his arms over his head in a show of distress.
He said that was how 22-year-old Nathan Carman first appeared to his crew members, while trying to get their attention.
He was in a rubber life raft that kept him alive for eight days while he drifted at sea.
Carman would later tell the U.S. Coast Guard that he'd gone fishing with his mother on Sept. 18.
He said the same day they departed, he heard a funny noise in the engine compartment and their 9.5-metre aluminum fishing vessel called The Chicken Pox started taking on water.
Carman said he lost sight of his mother and she never made it onto the raft.
In a recorded interview with the Coast Guard, Carman can be heard asking if his mother was found. The Coast Guard answered no. Linda Carman, 54, is now presumed dead.
Hengdong said the seas were rough the day of the rescue and the winds were high.
After some careful manoeuvring, the freighter got close to enough to Carman for crew to throw him a life ring. He was able to swim to it and he was pulled on board.
Hengdong said Carman seemed tired but thankful and spent the first day on the ship just resting in his cabin.
He said the second day Carman was given permission to walk outside on the ship. Hengdong said Carman seemed sad.
The story of the rescue became a sensation along the Eastern seaboard. Then various news outlets started looking into Nathan Carman's past.
They reported that he had been a suspect in the 2013 murder of his grandfather. John Chakalos, 87, was then described as a multimillionaire real estate developer who was shot in his home.
The Hartford Courant newspaer reported that Chakalos' estate was worth about $40 million US, and his four daughters, including Linda Carman, were beneficiaries of about $21 million.
After the fishing vessel sank, The Courant also reported that police were investigating Nathan Carman for knowingly operating an unsafe vessel thereby putting his mother's life in danger.
Such twists in the story have kept it in the headlines and have fueled multiple media requests for interviews with Hengdong in port in Saint John.
As of Tuesday the only way to get permission to get on board Orient Lucky was to go through the shipping agent Tom O'Reilly.
In an interview dockside, O'Reilly said he was getting almost more phone calls than he could manage.
"When I've been on the phone, the phone is constantly beeping letting me know someone else wants to talk," said O'Reilly.
"As soon as I hang up, there's another call. And in order to do my regular job, I have to just not answer, sometimes."
"They're just wondering how they came across this guy. What was his physical condition? What do they think was his mental condition at the time."
O'Reilly said Orient Lucky is due to leave Saint John no later than Thursday. It's been loading scrap materials at the American Iron and Metal terminal on the west side of the port.
When that's done, it will sail for Turkey.
Hengdong said it could be several more trips before he makes a visit to his home in northern China. After working at sea for 16 years, Hengdong said Carman was his first rescue.
"I feel happy I can help," said Hengdong.
I post it to offer an example of bad journalism. This story is lacking a couple facts that should be obvious in any story...
Where did Nathan and Linda Carmen hail from?
Where did their boat depart from before it sank?
They mention this... "The Hartford Courant newspaer(sp) reported that Chakalos' estate was worth about $40 million US, and his four daughters, including Linda Carman, were beneficiaries of about $21 million."
So I guess I could deduce that they came from Hartford Connecticut, but news stories are not supposed to leave the reader needing to deduce facts... It's supposed to print the facts.
They never let 'facts' get in the way of a good murder mystery................
Sorry, no time for those things in today's Journalism curriculums - left wing indoctrination classes have replaced them.
This is exactly what the readers of Pravda had to deal with when reading the official news back in the USSR. The truth was printed in Pravda, but in a very roundabout and incomplete way. The discerning reader had to sift through he story and decipher the coded message to get to something close to the truth, and never the whole truth. That had to be deduced from the pattern of all news stories. An astute reader could do it, but it required effort and critical thinking skills.
Americans are not accustomed to doing this, but they need to learn, especially now at the dawn of the age of the censored internet. Our news is going to given to us the same way Soviet citizens received theirs, and from mainstream outlets, it has been that way for at least a generation.
Many of the wealthy who are not public figures fly under the radar to avoid becoming targets for robberies, kidnappings, beggars...
The Asperger syndrome part is left out as well.
A suspect in the shooting death of his grandfather, the death of whom resulted in $21 million left to his aunts and mother. Now this boating thing resulting in the death of his mother.
This smells bad.
Scrap iron for Turkey reminds me of scrap iron for Japan. I wonder if they will have the same return policy.
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This makes me feel old, when I had my first job behind the lunch counter of a "People's Drugstore" coffee was 5 cents. (why isn't there a cents key?)
What struck me even more was that the first half of the story offers no explicit hints, at least in my reading, about the revelations in the second half. For example, my impression was that the media interest, which is first mentioned at the very beginning, concerned just the "stunning rescue" and not the "twists in the story."
So otherwise a guy in a rubber raft 200 km off the coast wouldn't have seemed strange?
Try the Alt+0+1+6+2 combination using the number keypad and you’ll get it like so: ¢
Big story here in Connecticut where mom was from. The kid had a house in Vermont.
Last person to see gramps before gramps was killed. Now he takes mom fishing, but only he returned.
He was also in the news back in 2009 when he was 15 as he had run away. Was finally found in Virginia.
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