s The mother of a Newport Harbor High School graduate who died fighting a wildfire in Arizona last summer is suing local, county and state offices for $36 million.
Marcia McKee lists various violations in her complaint, including the Granite Mountain Hotshot team having no backup, no escape route and no one knowing where they were located before her son Grant and 18 others died.
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Grant McKee and Kevin Woyjeck, Hotshots Who Died in Arizona Blaze, Have Local Services Set
Her claim indicates she is willing to settle within the next 60 days for $12 million.
More than that, McKee tells KABC, she wants changes, including GPS locators for Hotshots, something her 21-year-old son's team lacked. And she wants answers.
“Grant was my world,” she told the news station. “I would feel better if I knew what really went wrong … because that's all I think about from the time I open my eyes to the time I shut them, how he had to suffer.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.