A Call for Help, Then a Tragedy

Maureen Martinez was frantic when she called her husband on her cellphone Monday night, telling him that her car had stalled on a submerged road in Highland. She was four months’ pregnant and worried she could not wade out of the surging swells.

Daniel Martinez said that at the couple’s home, he called 911 and then decided to venture into the rainstorm to help. Before he could get out the door, Maureen called back.

“She said, ‘Hurry! Things are getting worse,’ ” he recalled Wednesday.

It was the couple’s last conversation. Minutes later, Maureen Martinez, 35, was swept away by a giant wave and tossed into a surging creek, according to witnesses. San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies discovered her body Wednesday morning several miles downstream in the Santa Ana River, south of San Bernardino International Airport.

Firefighters and friends say the incident was a tragic fluke. Maureen Martinez was driving home from work along a major thoroughfare, Baseline Street, that was free of flooding just before 6 p.m. As she drove over City Creek -- a small culvert that crosses beneath the road -- a wall of floodwater washed over the street, trapping her in a surging torrent, according to officials.

“We believe she was caught in a flash flood of debris ... an instantaneous event that no one could have predicted,” said Chip Patterson, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. “This was no fault of hers. She was just unfortunate to be on the road.”

The flash flood pinned her silver Honda sedan against a concrete guardrail on Baseline Street, which is topped by a chain-link fence, a spokesman for the Martinez family said. Maureen Martinez climbed onto the roof of the car, but the water washed the car out from under her, leaving her clinging to the fence, he said.

A sheriff’s deputy who was at the scene but kept at bay by the coursing water used a bullhorn to urge her to hang on.

“At some point, the water was too much,” Patterson said.

Martinez vanished.

Helicopters and swift-water rescue teams from several cities searched through the night and all day Tuesday for the missing woman. They found her body about 10:30 a.m. the next day, west of a flood channel that connects City Creek to the Santa Ana River.

“This was literally an act of God,” said Frank Sexton, a firefighter with the Chino Valley Independent Fire District and spokesman for the family. Maureen Martinez’s brother, Jeff Brady, is a fellow Chino Valley firefighter.

Sexton said it was possible that a dam of debris upstream from Baseline Street burst just as Maureen Martinez was driving by, sending the wall of water across the road.

Daniel Martinez said he rushed to Baseline Street -- about a mile from his home -- and saw his wife’s car trapped in the water. He was not sure if she had been rescued.

“I turned around for a second, and the car was gone,” he said.

That stretch of Baseline Street was closed earlier in the day when flood debris from the creek covered part of the road and was reopened about 3 p.m. after bulldozers cleared it, Patterson said. Several motorists who drove through there Monday night told sheriff’s deputies that the pavement was clear just before Maureen Martinez drove through.

Daniel Martinez said he was upset that previous news reports erroneously suggested that his wife drove around safety barriers to venture onto Baseline Street.

He described his wife as extremely cautious, saying she had scolded him in the past for driving over the painted lane lines in parking lots, even when the lots were empty.

“She would have never driven into a dangerous situation,” Daniel Martinez said.

Maureen Martinez was director of financial aid at San Bernardino Valley College, and Daniel Martinez is an associate director of research at Riverside Community College. They met in 1997 at San Bernardino Valley College, where Daniel Martinez previously worked.

They were married in 2000 and were expecting their first child. Daniel Martinez has a daughter from a previous marriage.

The couple had just started to prepare a baby’s room, which they had planned to paint yellow and green.

Clutching a damp tissue, Daniel Martinez stood under the open garage door of the couple’s two-story beige home in East Highlands on Wednesday, greeting friends and family who came by to offer support.

“I was lucky to have her,” he said.

“She got me, and I know I’m not easy to get. I can only hope I made her happier than she made me. I was very happy.”

He said that he had tried to remain stoic but that it had been hard.

“It comes and it goes,” he said, his eyes beginning to swell. “You don’t know how you will react to something like this ... until it happens to you.”