The truth behind Instagram bloggers who plunged to their deaths taking selfie at tourist spot

A couple were drunk when they fell 250 metres to their deaths while taking a selfie at a popular tourist spot in the US, an autopsy has revealed.

According to the autopsy investigation by Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department, Meenakshi Moorthy, 30, and her husband, Vishnu Viswanath, 29, were “intoxicated with ethyl alcohol prior to death” in October, The Mercury News reported.

The pair were at a popular lookout spot at Yosemite National Park in California when they fell.

The couple, originally from India, died “of multiple injuries to the head, neck, chest and abdomen, sustained by a fall from a mountain,” forensic pathologist Dr Sung-Ook Baik said.

Andrea Stewart, assistant Mariposa County coroner, told the publication it is unknown what levels their intoxication was at the time of their deaths.

A man who had hiked to the same spot with his girlfriend captured pictures of Ms Moorthy prior to her fall, saying she accidentally appears in the background of two of their selfie photos.

Sean Matteson said Ms Moorthy stood out from the crowd enjoying the sunset atop Taft Point because her hair was dyed bright pink and that she made him a little nervous because he felt she was standing too close to the edge.

“She was very close to the edge, but it looked like she was enjoying herself,” said Mr Matteson, who lives in Oakland, California.

“I was not about to get that close to the edge. But she seemed comfortable. She didn’t seem like she was in distress or anything.”

The couple, who married in 2014, had recently moved to California from New York with Mr Viswanath, a successful software engineer, taking up a job at Cisco in San Jose.

The couple was “travel-obsessed,” according to Ms Moorthy on her blog called “Holidays and HappilyEverAfters” filled with photos of them in front of snowy peaks, the Eiffel tower and tulip fields.

She had wanted to work full-time as a travel blogger, Viswanath said.

On March 28 last year, Ms Moorthy shared a sunset image on Instagram where she can be seen sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

In the caption she questions the lengths people are going to for the perfect image on social media.

“A lot of us including yours truly is a fan of daredevilry attempts of standing at the edge of cliffs and skyscrapers, but did you know that wind gusts can be FATAL?” she wrote.

The couple graduated in 2010 from the College of Engineering, Chengannur, in Alapuzha district of Kerala state, one of their professors, Dr Nisha Kuruvilla, told AP.

She said the couple were both good students who were fond of travelling and had married at a Hindu temple in Kerala in southern India four years ago.

In India, after a rash of selfie-related deaths, the Tourism Ministry in April asked state government officials to safeguard tourists by installing signs in areas where accidents had occurred declaring them “no-selfie zones.”