Freeway Crash Results in 2 Deaths, 2 Injured

A woman traveling with her two young children died Friday night after a two-car crash on the Ventura Freeway, and the suspected drunk driver of the second car was killed when he was struck by a vehicle as he fled the scene, authorities said.

The accident occurred about 7 p.m. on the southbound side of the freeway at the Del Norte Boulevard offramp, and sent the woman, her son and daughter, between 3 and 5 years old, to local hospitals with serious injuries, authorities said. The woman, who was not identified pending notification of relatives, was pronounced dead a short time later at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo.

The girl was taken by Sheriff’s Department helicopter to Ventura County Medical Center, where she was listed in critical condition Friday night, according to a hospital spokeswoman. The boy was listed in critical condition at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

First on the scene was 24-year-old Zeke Jaquez, an off-duty public safety officer at Cal Lutheran University. Jaquez said he was southbound on the freeway when a white Ford Mustang came up behind him in the fast lane at about 90 mph. After making an abrupt turn into the center lane, the Mustang hit a red Toyota Camry station wagon driven by the woman, and both cars careened off the freeway onto the right shoulder and struck two eucalyptus trees.

“I saw the man from the Mustang go up to the call box about 200 feet down the road,” Jaquez said.

Other drivers had stopped and Jaquez requested their help. “I said to the other citizens, ‘Don’t let him go. Let’s go get him,’ ” he said.

About that time, a California Highway Patrol officer pulled up at the scene and Jaquez asked to borrow the officer’s handcuffs. Jaquez, who ran after the unidentified man, said that when he caught up to him he smelled alcohol on the man’s breath.

The man broke free and began yelling that he had a gun. As Jaquez approached him a second time, the man ran across the southbound lanes of the freeway, jumped the center divider and continued running across the northbound lanes, where he was struck by a Toyota truck.

As paramedics and personnel from the Oxnard and Ventura County fire departments used rescue equipment to free the woman and her children from the wreckage of their station wagon, about 20 people gathered on the Del Norte Boulevard overpass to look at the man’s body that lay on the shoulder of the freeway.

“This was like a movie,” said Jaquez. “The first thing I saw when I went up to the Toyota Camry was the ring on the woman’s finger, and I thought there’s probably a father out there waiting for them to come home.”