Search for three missing people ends at fatal crash site in Gölköy

The victims were Berat Kavak, identified as the driver, and his passengers, Ayşegül Tamalan and Muhammed Yiğit. According to a dispatch by DHA reporter Ahmet Bayrak, responding teams found that the car had tumbled approximately 300 metres into the streambed at Andız, on the Gölköy–Mesudiye road.⁠2

The account describes two alerts: first, relatives asking for help after losing contact with the three; then, the following morning, a report of a crash while the missing-person search was still under way. Those alerts establish the sequence of the search and emergency response. They do not establish the time of the crash.⁠2

Relatives had been unable to reach Kavak, Tamalan and Yiğit on November 13 and notified the 112 emergency call centre. Teams began searching during the night. DHA does not give an exact time for either the relatives’ call or the start of the search.⁠2

The next morning, a crash alert brought medical personnel, police and firefighters to Andız. There, crews located the car, registration 52 AIB 007, and confirmed that all three occupants had died. After an examination at the scene, their bodies were taken to the morgue at Gölköy State Hospital.⁠2

The report does not specify who made the morning crash call, precisely when the car was discovered, or how the bodies were brought out of the streambed. It also gives no numerical ages for the victims. Descriptions elsewhere of them as “young people” are not enough to establish their ages.⁠2⁠5⁠6

The interval between the loss of contact and the discovery cannot be treated as a confirmed period in which anyone remained alive or could have been rescued. The available account contains no finding about when the occupants died. A chronology of calls and searches is not a medical or forensic reconstruction of what happened inside the car.

DHA reported that an investigation had begun. Its dispatch does not identify a mechanical fault, road condition, weather factor, speed, impairment or any other established explanation for the car leaving the road. No subsequent investigative conclusion is established in the available reporting.⁠2⁠6⁠8

The approximately 300-metre figure also needs to be read for what it is: the reported extent of the fall into the streambed, not a detailed reconstruction of the vehicle’s entire movement. It does not establish an uninterrupted free fall, the car’s speed or the point at which control was lost. The severity of the outcome cannot, by itself, explain its cause.

DHA also reported that Yiğit was serving a sentence at Ordu E Type Closed Prison and had left two days earlier on 10 days of authorised leave—placing his departure on November 12. Nothing in the account connects that legal status to the crash or describes an escape or unauthorised absence.⁠2

His given name appears as Muhammed in the dispatch’s identification of the victims and as Muhammet in its prison-leave paragraph. That inconsistency remains unresolved; this article uses Muhammed, the form used in the principal identification.⁠2

The factual account rests chiefly on Bayrak’s November 14 DHA dispatch, also published by Hürriyet, rather than a separately obtained official investigative finding. For the families, the search has ended with confirmation of three deaths. An explanation of how they happened still depends on evidence the investigation has yet to establish publicly in the available reporting.⁠2⁠1