Hotel Heater Victim Out of Coma, on Way to ‘Amazing’ Recovery

Henry Kim Wong, the 20-year-old Canadian volleyball player who was poisoned last week by carbon monoxide leaking from a hotel’s dirty heater, came out of a coma Monday, ate his first solid food and spoke to his father, having begun what UC San Diego Medical Center officials called an “amazing” recovery.

Meanwhile, at the Mission Valley Inn where Wong was poisoned and a teammate killed, city building inspectors reinspected the 36 rooms they had closed last week because of faulty gas heaters and found all but three had been repaired to their satisfaction.

San Diego city officials said they do not expect to levy any fines against the owner of the 210-room hotel, Atlas Hotels, which has until Feb. 4 to complete repairs.

“The hotel has responded . . . rapidly to our concerns and is addressing the problem,” Michael G. Kemp, a deputy director in the city’s Building Inspection Department, said at a news conference held to urge San Diego County hotel and apartment owners to maintain gas heaters and smoke detectors. “Our concern is more to educate the public so this won’t be an annual occurrence.”

Wong and 21-year-old Cory Louis Korosi, both members of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology men’s volleyball team, were discovered on New Year’s Day in Room 329 of the Mission Valley Inn. Korosi had died by the time hotel staff forced its way into the bolted second-floor hotel room, and Wong was unconscious.

Despite initial predictions that Wong would be hopelessly brain damaged, a UCSD neurologist said Monday that Wong had tested normal in motor function, sensation, coordination, vision and hearing. Dr. Patrick Lyden said Wong’s intelligence could not yet be tested, but that his short-term memory and his command over simple arithmetic and language skills seem intact.

“These are all excellent signs and give us hope for further recovery,” Lyden said in a statement. “Henry has made dramatic improvement.”

Nancy Stringer, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said Wong fed himself Monday and, although his throat hurt from the ventilator that until Monday was helping him breathe, he was able to talk.

“He understands what’s being asked of him and responds appropriately,” she said. “It’s pretty amazing.”

Hank Hoxie, Atlas Hotels’ administrative vice president, again expressed “sincere concern and sorrow” Monday for the teammates and families of Wong and Korosi. He called the incident the worst catastrophe in the history of the 38-year-old company, which has owned the Mission Valley Inn since 1958.

Hoxie said that, until a Metro Arson Strike Team investigation is completed, the company will not speculate about what caused the heater to malfunction. He said the heater was maintained “regularly,” but could not specify the last time it had been inspected.

Hoxie also said that, of the several rooms the city had cited for having inoperative smoke alarms, all were repaired by simply adding batteries. “None of the units malfunctioned,” he said. “They just didn’t have batteries.”

None of the other San Diego hotels owned by Atlas--the King’s Inn, the Hanalei and the Town and Country--have gas wall heaters similar to the Mission Valley Inn, Hoxie said, and eventually it, too, will be upgraded to electric heat pump systems.

Now, 22 rooms are being remodeled, including two of the three that failed inspection Monday. The third is Room 329, where the poisoning occurred.

Atlas Hotels has hired a licensed heating and plumbing company, A.O. Reed & Co., to advise them about further renovations and to conduct “frequent” inspections of the gas heaters--perhaps as often as every 90 days, Hoxie said.

“We believe this hotel is safe,” he said of the 187 rooms that as of Monday were available at a nightly rate of $49 to $69. “In my layman’s opinion, I think an annual inspection is sufficient. But we are going to check them on a more frequent basis, just to make sure.”

Across town, at the city Building Inspection Department, Kemp and Tom Vincent, the president of the San Diego County Hotel-Motel Assn., released a draft of a letter they plan to send to all owners and operators of hotels, motels and rental housing in the county.

The letter, which was drafted with help from the San Diego County Apartment Owners Assn., states that, especially in light of Korosi’s death, landlords and innkeepers should have heaters and life-safety systems checked “at least once a year.”

“We believe it is in the best interest of landlords to make sure that their property is properly maintained and that the required safety equipment is in place and operating so that additional tragedies do not happen,” the letter states.

Kemp said that, as yet, the city has no regulations mandating such maintenance. But, in the wake of the Mission Valley Inn fatality, some San Diego City Council members have discussed holding hearings to discuss such stricter measures. If the council were to mandate such compliance, Kemp said, his department would need more staff.

“Clearly, with our current level of staffing, we aren’t prepared to do that,” he said.

There is no estimate of how many of the county’s 40,000 hotel and motel rooms are heated with gas wall units such as the one that malfunctioned.