By Khalida Sarwari
A woman who was struck and killed by a vehicle on state Highway 156 in Castroville on Thursday morning had stopped with her 12-year-old son to help people with car trouble, according to a California Highway Patrol spokesman.
The woman, 36-year-old Veronica Brumley, was driving a red Acura sport utility vehicle west on the highway shortly before 11 a.m. when she noticed a Volkswagen Jetta that had run out of gas on the left shoulder, CHP Officer Robert Lehman said.
She stopped her car on the right shoulder and a couple, who was in the disabled vehicle, walked along the shoulder of the two-lane freeway to meet Brumley behind her car, Lehman said.
Then as she was getting back inside her car, a Toyota Avalon going west on the highway struck Brumley. She was pronounced dead there.
Lehman said the woman’s son was sitting in the passenger seat of her car and saw the crash.
The CHP sent a grief counselor to console the son and his stepfather, who arrived a short time later to pick him up.
The people in the disabled vehicle were also “shaken up,” Lehman said.
The driver of the Toyota Avalon was an 18-year-old woman from Southern California who was on her way to the University of California at Santa Cruz campus to visit a family member, Lehman said.
She was not cited or arrested. There was no indication she was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
The crash remains under investigation.