3 Women Killed, 2 Injured as Speeding Car Hits a Tree

What apparently began as a beach outing ended as a triple-fatal accident early Monday when a car carrying five young women--who may have been speeding because they feared a car was following them--spun out of control and flipped over the side of a freeway in West Los Angeles, authorities said.

Three of the occupants--including the driver, 19-year-old Ruby Garcia of La Puente--were killed instantly when the car hit a tree.

A fourth woman sustained massive injuries and was in critical condition at UCLA Medical Center. The fifth woman--Raquel Cornejo, 19, of South-Central Los Angeles--suffered a broken leg. A UCLA spokeswoman said she was in stable condition.

California Highway Patrol investigators said the accident was unusually deadly, especially with all the victims in one car.

“This is very unusual, to have a triple fatal,” Officer Tad Yamashita said. “It’s not something that occurs every day. Our normal accident out here is a rear-ending.”

Authorities said they do not know where the women were going or why they were traveling on the Santa Monica Freeway at speeds close to 80 m.p.h.

However, Cornejo’s mother, Oralia Geron, said her daughter told her she was going to the beach with friends Sunday afternoon. Geron, who spoke with her daughter briefly in the UCLA emergency room after the accident, said Raquel told her the women were speeding because they believed they were being followed and feared that the occupants of the car behind them might shoot at them.

“She doesn’t know if it is a man or a woman,” Geron said of the driver of the car that was reportedly following the young women. “But she’s afraid, because of what has happened too many times,” Geron added in reference to shootings and other random violence on area freeways.

According to the CHP, the women were driving a 1980 Toyota east in the fast lane near the Overland Boulevard exit about 12:20 a.m. when they came upon another car and tried to swerve around it. Instead, the Toyota clipped the other car, whose occupants were not injured. Garcia lost control and the car crossed all lanes of traffic, hit the curb on the side of the freeway and went airborne.

“It rolled several times,” CHP Officer Dwight McDonald said. “And it came to rest wrapped around a tree.”

McDonald said it took paramedics 90 minutes to extricate Cornejo from the wreckage.

Further information was unavailable, in part part because authorities were unable to interview the two survivors. A CHP spokesman said officials were unable to determine the identity of two of the five victims: one of the dead women and the woman who was critically injured.

The identity of the third dead woman was not released. However Cornejo’s mother, interviewed at the hospital as she waited for her daughter to recover from surgery, said that woman had a husband and two young children--a 6-year-old boy and a 3-year-old daughter.