My question is how much money, time and materials were expended because this person wanted to go on a hike? People who do this should reimburse society for their foolishishness. This is not an accident. It is a willful decision that went bad.
I was following the story as we were on Maui at the time this was going on, and we've hiked in the Makawao reserve ourselves. I looked for the article and couldn't find it but as I recall after the first few days of searching, the police/fire department suspended their efforts because they felt that they had done all they could do. Subsequent to that everything was done by volunteers and funded by her parents.
I hike alone sometimes but because I'm a chicken I usually stick to well traveled, familiar trails. The Makawao reserve is heavily forested and I can see how you could get turned around. Btw, I have gotten lost exactly once in the last 40 years of hiking and I wasn't hiking alone. We were lucky and found our way back, but two takeaways that I had from that experience was how quickly we got lost, and that it must have happened because we were talking. We clearly missed a turn because it was a loop trail (can't get lost on a loop) but even when we retraced our steps and found the trail again and kept looking for the place where we missed an obvious turn, we never saw it. So weird. This happened in Joshua Tree NP, was a trail recommended by the rangers, and we had a map. Go figure.