Multi-Pronged Tragedy

The surf at Big Lagoon beach creates a moderate undertow on Monday, Nov. 26, 2012 near Trinidad, Calif. A family that tried to rescue their dog from powerful surf at the beach in Northern California were swept out to sea, leaving the parents dead and their 16-year-old son missing, authorities said. (AP Photo/The Times-Standard, Jose Quezada) (Jose Quezada)

 

We humans have a tendency to become extremely emotionally attached to concepts like loyalty and responsibility, particularly when those concepts themselves become attached to providing the needs, both practical and emotional that one undertakes the responsibility for when committing to the care of a canine companion.  For many people that canine companion assumes just a vital part of their emotional baggage as would a human member of their family.

And for a family living in the United States, their love and commitment to their family dog proved their undoing.  Gregory James Kuljian, sixteen years old and valuing the safety and security of the family canine companion was fearful for its survival when it plunged into the powerful surf in Northern California.

The dog did that to retrieve a stick that had been thrown for its amusement in a game that has been played out innumerable times between dog and human all over the world.  On this occasion the stick plunged too close to the ocean at Big Lagoon, about 500 kilometres north of San Francisco.  Gregory James Kuljian tried to save his family's dog from drowning.

He emerged, not having found his pet, but in the interim while he was still in the water,l his father, Howard Gregory Kuljian, 54, had himself struggled into the surf to try to find his son.  At the boy's emergence, and the realization that his father was nowhere to be seen, both he and his mother, Mary Elena Scott, 57, ventured back into the cold, powerful surf.

All three family members, father, mother, son drowned.  The Coast Guard ended its search for the boy, after would-be rescuers had retrieved his parents' bodies.  The family dog is now homeless; it managed somehow to persevere, and finally emerged on its own.