Authorities have publicly identified five people who lost their lives over the past several weeks to San Diego County traffic crashes.
The most recent of the roadway deaths took place shortly before 6 a.m. Monday, when Marcella Tortes, 31, crashed the vehicle she was driving onto an embankment alongside Pala Temecula Road near Aruba Road in Pala, according to the county Medical Examiner’s Office. Tortes died at the scene of the crash.
Two days earlier, a car crash in Sorrento Valley fatally injured a 28-year-old man, the county agency reported. Patrick Kitts of San Diego was behind the wheel of a sedan that veered off Mira Mesa Boulevard and struck a tree in a landscaped center median about 5:40 a.m. last Saturday. Kitts died before paramedics could take him to a hospital.
Around daybreak on March 3, a fiery wreck on the Interstate 805 bridge over Mission Valley claimed the life of a commercial trucker. Alvaro Lara Hernandez, 49, was headed south on the towering span about 6 a.m. when the tractor-trailer he was driving veered off the roadway, hit a row of impact-absorbing barrels in front of a concrete wall alongside the ramp to I-8 and became engulfed in flames, according to the medical examiner and California Highway Patrol. Lara Hernandez, a resident of the Merced County city of Dos Palos, died at the site of the crash.
On March 1, a motorist found 43-year-old Andres Gallardo lying gravely injured near a bicycle on Ashford Street in Clairemont, apparently having been struck by a vehicle, the county agency reported. An ambulance crew took Gallardo to Sharp Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead early the next day.
On Feb. 19, Kathryn Murphy, 80, was severely injured when the car she was riding in collided with another vehicle at Avenida Encinas and Palomar Airport Road in Murphy’s hometown of Carlsbad, according to the medical examiner. Paramedics took her to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, where she died 19 days later.