WHERE WAS HASTINGS DURING THE 3-4 HOURS AFTER HE LEFT JORDANNA'S APARTMENT? HE WASN'T ON FIRE UNTIL 4:30 AM. HIS WHEREABOUTS ARE UNACCOUNTED FOR AT LEAST 3 HOURS. THAT'S A PRIME EXAMPLE OF HOW MODERN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING SHOULD BE DONE. The crash was apparently 1.5 miles from his apartment and he wasn't headed toward it before the explosion. Crash Burn Cover Story Salt Lake City Weekly
His behavior grew increasingly erratic. Helicopters often circle over the hills, but Hastings believed there were more of them around whenever he was at home, keeping an eye on him.
He came to believe his Mercedes was being tampered with.
One night in June,
he came to Thigpen’s apartment after midnight and urgently asked to borrow her Volvo. He said he was afraid to drive his own car. She declined, telling him her car was having mechanical problems.
“He was scared, and
he wanted to leave town,” she says.
jordanna thigpen - Google Search
But despite going after big game, Hastings tended to be nonchalant about possible repercussions. “Whenever I’d been reporting around groups of dudes whose job it was to kill people,” he said once, “
one of them would usually mention that they were going to kill me.”
Who Killed Michael Hastings -- New York Magazine
By the middle of June, though, Hastings, then 33, had become openly afraid. Helicopters are a common sight in the Hollywood Hills, but he had told Jordanna Thigpen, a neighbor he’d become close to, that there were more of them in the sky than usual, and he was certain they were tracking him. On Saturday the 15th, he called Matt Farwell, his writing partner, and said Farwell might be interviewed by the FBI. Farwell was unsettled.
“He was being really cagey over the phone, which was odd, very odd,” Farwell says.
On the 17th, Hastings e-mailed colleagues at BuzzFeed to warn them that “the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates’ ”; he was “onto a big story” and needed to go “off the rada[r] for a bit … hope to see you all soon.”
“He was deeply agitated,” says
The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur. Since Hastings didn’t want to say anything more over e-mail or the phone,
Farwell, who lived in Virginia, set up a lunch for him the following Thursday with a trusted friend of Farwell’s, also in L.A., so that she could pass along whatever Hastings had to tell him on her forthcoming trip East.
The lunch never happened. At 4:20 a.m. on Tuesday, June 18, Hastings’s silver Mercedes C250 coupe, speeding south on Highland Avenue, crossed Melrose, jumped the median, hit a palm tree, and exploded. The charred body of the driver was identified by the Los Angeles coroner as John Doe 117 until fingerprints confirmed that the deceased was Michael Hastings.
