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Sunnyvale Hiker Among 4 Americans Dead on Mount Everest

A Bay Area man who had been planning to climb Mount Everest for at least a decade was among the four Americans killed in the avalanche unleashed by a powerful earthquake in Nepal.

On Monday, the U.S. State Department confirmed that Vinh B. Truong, of Sunnyvale, California, was among the four Americans killed at the hikers' base camp in Saturday's avalanche. The official death toll from the disaster has soared past 4,000 people, though that number is expected to climb significantly.

Truong was an outdoorsman who enjoyed river rafting and paragliding, but most of all hiking, and was a data manager at Kaiser Permanente.

Friend Michelle Fennessy met Truong while both were studying at the University of Chicago. They both loved the outdoors, and she was struck by Truong's sense of humor.

"He was very respectful, funny, adventurous," she said. "He was a a really happy person."

The State Department has identified the other American as Thomas Ely Taplin, 61, of Evergreen, Colorado. He was working on a documentary about the community of climbers at the base camp and had been there only a short time when the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck, his wife, Cory Freyer, said Monday.

Eighteen people were killed by gusts of wind that blasted through Everest's base camp during the avalanche.

The other two Americans haven't been officially named yet.

However, Google has said that one of its executives, Dan Fredinburg, died on Everest on Saturday. And Seattle-based Madison Mountaineering has said that Marisa Eve Girawong also died in the avalanche. The 28-year-old from Edison, New Jersey, was working as a physician assistant with a climbing team.

All the U.S. citizens were killed at the Mount Everest base camp, State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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