Woman run over and killed by big rig while sleeping underneath cardboard in Echo Park parking lot
A homeless woman sleeping underneath cardboard in the parking lot of a Vons grocery store in Echo Park was run over and killed by a big rig early Tuesday, authorities said.
Around 1 a.m., near the intersection of Alvarado and Montana streets, a commercial truck driver drove into the parking lot and ran over a pile of cardboard, where the woman had been sleeping, said Officer Tony Im, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department.
The driver had entered the parking lot to make a U-turn when it struck the woman, the LAPD told KTLA-TV Channel 5.
To some in Boyle Heights, the proposal is yet another insult to a community they feel has been persistently shortchanged.
The woman was only described as being in her 30s, as the L.A. County coroner’s office worked to identify her.
A passerby saw the body of the woman and called authorities, saying they believed the woman was already dead, said Brian Humphrey, spokesman for Los Angeles Fire Department. Once fire paramedics arrived, they pronounced the woman dead at the scene.
The driver of the truck, who stayed at the scene, told LAPD traffic division detectives that they thought the truck hit debris but had not been aware of the sleeping woman, Im said.
No other injuries were reported in the incident, Humphrey said.
The LAHSA count found that there were no unsheltered people in the northwest quarter of Venice.
The woman’s death comes at a time of increasing deaths for unhoused people in Los Angeles. In 2021, deaths of unhoused people rose by 56%. Although the increase was largely driven by overdose deaths, the number of unhoused people killed by traffic injuries also rose by more than 30%.
Traffic accident injuries involving people sleeping in public places have also occurred elsewhere in Los Angeles.
Last year, a sedan that had been struck by another car slammed into a homeless encampment in Koreatown, hospitalizing four people. One unhoused man died in 2020 when a driver lost control and ran his car off the road and into a South Los Angeles encampment.
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