Angela Lin avoided risky sports.
Surfing? Too dangerous. Swimming too far from the beach? Scared of sharks. Rock climbing? No way.
But she loved the outdoors.
Making plans with her boyfriend and two other friends to hike through the giant sequoia trees in Yosemite National Park last weekend, the 29-year-old Google software engineer had nothing really to fear.
But in a freak accident July 19 walking just a few steps ahead of the others on a mostly paved old stagecoach road, Angela was struck and killed by a falling tree limb. Her family believes the heavy branch — the width of a tire rim — likely killed her instantly.
It didn’t matter on that Saturday afternoon in Tuolumne Grove just a mile from the parking lot, when only a faint breeze wafted through the giant sequoias, that Angela was always so careful.
“This breaks my heart,” said Elisabeth Barton, a founding member of Echo Adventure Cooperative that guides tourists several days a week along the same trail. “It’s that constant battle between safety and exploration.”
Family questions
Angela’s parents, who live in the Southern California city of Monterey Park, want more information from the park service. What kind of tree dropped the limb? Is the park doing any trimming to prevent further tragedies? But they haven’t heard back and the National Park Service didn’t return messages this week from the Bay Area New Group.
While Angela’s boyfriend, her 22-year-old brother and her parents, who immigrated from Taiwan in 1987 to pursue their doctorates, prepare for an Aug. 9 memorial service near their home, her father is struggling with regrets of his own.
“Angela was very close to my wife,” Peter Lin, 66, said in an interview Thursday evening with the Bay Area News Group. “But for me? Maybe I’m a poor communicator. I don’t know how to express my love for my daughter.”
Her death was so sudden, so shocking, he said, his voice cracking, “I have no more chance to express my love to her.”
Angela’s mother, who asked not to be identified in this story to protect her privacy, knew all about Angela’s hiking plans through Yosemite last weekend. They talked for sometimes two hours every Sunday. But her father, used to more perfunctory conversations with her, had no idea.
So when he was packing up from his pickleball game last Saturday evening, he didn’t believe that the man who called his cell phone from a strange number was really a park ranger. Maybe he was a scammer, Lin thought, trying to shake him down for money by making up a cruel story about his daughter dying on a Yosemite Park trail.
Lin demanded the man put Angela’s boyfriend, David Hua, on the phone. And that’s when he realized the unthinkable news was true.
“David was crying,” Lin said, “and he told me the whole story.”
Angela Lin, the 29-year-old Google software engineer, in a photo from 2017 at Banff National Park. Lin was killed in a freak accident by a falling tree limb while hiking at Yosemite National Park with friends onJuly 19th. (Photo courtesy of the Lin Family)
She had many talents
Angela and Hua had been dating since they met eight years ago during their senior year at UC Berkeley. Graduating with honors in 2017 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences, Angela went on to earn a masters degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. During the COVID pandemic, she volunteered as a mentor to 20 middle school students, using interactive coding assignments to “make computer science more accessible to communities of color,” she wrote on her LinkedIn page. She worked as a research engineer at Salesforce before joining Google in 2022. She lived in Mountain View.
“We lost a loved and respected member of our team,” Google said in a statement. “We’re very saddened by this tragedy, and our hearts are with their family and loved ones.”
Hua created a gofundme page in her honor; it’s not to raise money for her family or the memorial service set for Aug. 9 in Southern California, but rather to donate to one of her favorite causes, KQED public radio. She “believed in the power of knowledge and community,” Hua wrote, “and was saddened by the recent federal defunding of public media.”
On the fund-raising page, Hua posted photos of the dark-haired hiker with a big smile sporting a backpack near a beach, in a rain jacket and hood near a mountain lake and in a sun hat and sunglasses high on a golden grass-covered hillside. They trekked through Banff National Park in Canada and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
“She cherished nature and the outdoors, whether it was strolls along the beach, hikes in the mountains, or simply walks outside,” said Hua, who did not respond to interview requests from the Bay Area News Group. “Angela was known for her kindness, sincerity, and genuine and deep connections with others.”
She was an avid swing dancer and an “excellent baker, working her way through Claire Saffitz cookbooks while baking delicious desserts for her friends,” he wrote.
As a research intern for Microsoft in 2019, she developed a statistical model for “aligning steps in text recipes with cooking videos.”
She loved to sing and play guitar and joined choirs in high school and college. She ran on the high school track team — at 5-foot-8 with long legs she was quick, her father said, and was always a brisk walker.
So it didn’t surprise him, he said, when Hua told him that Angela was a few steps ahead of everyone else that warm afternoon as they chatted along the trail, admiring the massive trunks of the giant sequoias, some that may be 2,000 and 3,000 years old. It was about 4:30 when a crackling noise caught their attention.
“They were trying to figure out the cracking sound when just two or three seconds later, that limb just fell from the sky,” Peter Lin said. “David closed his eyes and when he opened them, Angela was already knocked unconscious.”
“It hit her directly,” he said.
Hua called 911. He performed CPR, but she didn’t respond. Blood pooled at her head.
The Tuolumne County coroner confirmed in a statement what they already knew. Her death was “accidental, resulting from blunt injuries.”
Of the roughly 3- to 4 million people who visit Yosemite every year, an average of 11 to 15 people die there annually. Most are slips and falls — sometimes when taking selfies. Some are from drowning. Fatalities from falling rocks — or trees — are less common, but happen. In 2015, two teenage boys from Southern California were killed in their sleep in the Upper Pines Campground, a popular spot in Yosemite Valley, when a large oak tree branch hit their tent early one August morning.
Yosemite removes and trims trees to try to prevent hazards, especially if they “have the potential to fall and strike a person, building, or structure,” according to the park’s website. But the park is vast, at 1,200 square miles.
Trees in Yosemite, like everywhere across the Western United States, have been weakened by drought and bark beetles over the past decade — but it’s usually oaks that lose their limbs, said Barton of Echo Adventures. In 2017, at the end of a four-year drought, Yosemite estimated there were 2.4 million dead trees within 131,000 acres of the park and issued a warning to visitors that falling trees and limbs “may pose risk to life and infrastructure.”
“The hard part about what happened to Angela is that there’s really nothing that could have changed the situation,” Barton said. “There’s no amount of education. There is nothing the Park Service could have done differently. This was just an accident.”
Angela’s father, though, wants the park to do more to prevent deaths like his daughter’s.
“We want to help,” he said, “and we hope this will be the last tragedy that happens in the national parks.”
In the meantime, he hopes other parents will learn from his mistakes and be more expressive with their children.
“Pick up the phone. Say a few words if you can,” he said. “That’s my advice to other fathers, so they won’t regret like me.”