Inland Valley

BANNING — A nurse who killed a 20-year-old skateboarder in a hit-and-run while she was driving drunk in Banning pleaded guilty Wednesday to DUI gross vehicular manslaughter and was immediately sentenced to 15 years in state prison.

Lilliana Ruvalcaba Diaz, 30, of Banning admitted the felony charge, as well as a sentence-enhancing allegation of fleeing the scene of a crime, under a plea agreement with the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. In exchange for her admissions, prosecutors dropped several related allegations.

Superior Court Judge Mark Singerton certified the terms of the plea deal and imposed the sentence stipulated by the prosecution and defense.

Diaz was arrested last year following a 13-month investigation into the death of Leron Sanders.

According to an arrest declaration affidavit filed by the Banning Police Department, the defendant consumed a bottle of Cisco wine and a 24-ounce Budweiser on the night of Dec. 8, 2019, while at a friend’s house.

She later admitted to investigators that when she left the residence to return home, she was intoxicated, but chose to get behind the wheel of her Honda Civic anyway, the declaration stated.

About 5:30 p.m., while driving through the intersection of Apex and Ramsey streets, she slammed into Sanders as he was skateboarding in a pedestrian path, out of the way of traffic, police said.

The defendant struck him on the driver’s side of her sedan, and his body landed on her windshield but rolled off as she sped away, according to the affidavit.

Diaz later told detectives that she was unaware that she had struck someone.

Other motorists came upon Sanders lying in the roadway and called 911. He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.

Diaz’s mother, whose identity was not disclosed, saw the condition of her daughter’s car when she parked outside their residence in the 500 block of 40th Street and immediately feared an injury accident had occurred, prompting the woman to call the police, according to the declaration.

The ensuing investigation led to patrol officers questioning Diaz that night and determining she had a blood alcohol level of nearly .2 — or well over twice the legal limit to operate a motor vehicle, according to court papers.

When asked whether she realized she had been in a crash on the way home, Diaz replied, “she did not know what happened,” according to the police statement.

“Lilliana confirmed that she knew the importance of stopping at an accident scene to make sure everyone was okay and the procedures involved,” the affidavit stated.

“`I’m aware that I should not be driving and drinking,”‘ she told officers.

The defendant made no other admissions.

There was no word on why the criminal complaint was not filed until a year after the deadly hit-and-run.

Diaz was taken into custody without incident on Jan. 22, 2021.

She had no documented prior felony convictions.

A Hemet man who died Sunday, March 27, in a motorcycle crash in the southwest Riverside County community of Aguanga was a U.S. Forest Service firefighter assigned to the San Bernardino National Forest, that agency said Wednesday.

Desmond Palmer, 34, worked at Station 54 in Valle Vista, east of Hemet, in the San Jacinto Ranger District, USFS spokesman Zachary Behrens said.

Palmer joined the USFS in 2019 as a temporary firefighter on Engine 54, “finding a new passion in his life and becoming a key member,” Behrens wrote in an email. He became a permanent senior firefighter on the engine in 2020.

“Desmond was an incredibly positive person who always encouraged and uplifted his coworkers,” Engine 54 Capt. Daniel Diaz said in a statement provided by Behrens. “He had an infectious laugh that could cut through any situation and improve morale around him. The loss of Desmond will be felt heavily across the district.”

The crash happened at 4:20 p.m. on Sage Road north of Tyler Street, the California Highway Patrol said. Palmer, who was off duty, was riding north on Sage when for unknown reasons he veered off the right side of the road and was thrown from his bike, the CHP said.

Cal Fire/Riverside County firefighters pronounced Palmer dead at the scene. They alerted the USFS, Behrens said, and a USFS battalion chief and division chief participated in a procession to the coroner’s office.

SAN JACINTO — A 67-year-old driver of a white Jeep Wrangler who was injured in a four-vehicle crash in San Jacinto has become the second person in that accident to die from his injuries, authorities said.

Steven Hutchinson of San Jacinto died Friday afternoon at Riverside Community Hospital, according to the Riverside County coroner’s office.

The collision occurred at around 6:20 a.m. on March 17 on Ramona Expressway west of Warren Road, according to the coroner’s office.

The driver of a truck hauling a small trailer was headed east on Ramona Expressway when traffic stopped in front of him, prompting him to veer left into westbound lanes to avoid hitting the stopped vehicles, according to Sgt. Dawn Blair of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. The now wrong-way truck driver collided into a black Jeep Wrangler in front of him, a westbound Nissan Frontier and a westbound white Jeep Wrangler driven by Hutchinson.

The drivers of the truck and white Wrangler had to be extricated from the wreckage by firefighters and both were taken to a hospital, authorities said.

The truck driver died from his injuries that morning at Riverside University Health System Medical Center. He was identified as 88-year-old Francisco Salgado of Nuevo, according to the coroner’s office.

The drivers of the black Wrangler and Frontier were not injured.

Authorities said neither drugs nor alcohol appeared to be a factor in the collision.

A Moreno Valley man who crashed an SUV into a security station at a Long Beach apartment complex, killing a guard, was sentenced Tuesday, March 22, to two years in state prison after apologizing to the victim’s family.

Quentin Darnell Black, 32, pleaded no contest last month to a felony count of vehicular manslaughter for the June 12, 2021, collision that killed 54-year-old Derrick Smith of Los Angeles.

A second count against Black — hit-and-run driving — was dismissed as a result of the plea.

In an emotional statement in court, in which he addressed the victim’s family, Black said, “It (the crash) wasn’t on purpose. … I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. I did not mean to do that to Mr. Smith.”

The victim’s mother, Jenell Nelson, said she was “very disappointed with what’s going on here with Mr. Black.”

She said she believed the two-year prison sentence was “just a slap on the wrist.”

“Two years — I’m insulted,” she said. My family’s insulted.”

Superior Court Judge Chet Taylor noted that the sentence stemmed from an agreed-upon disposition between the prosecution and the defense.

The crash occurred at the Century Villages at Cabrillo apartment complex in the 2000 block of San Gabriel Avenue, near Pacific Coast Highway and the 103 Freeway.

Police said last year that a preliminary investigation revealed that the 2012 Chevy Tahoe was driving at a high rate of speed when it appeared to lose control and strike the security guard shack.

Police officers found the guard injured inside the shack and provided medical aid until paramedics arrived. Medical personnel continued to administer aid, but Smith died at the scene.

Black abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot. He was arrested by Long Beach police two days after the crash and subsequently released on bond, according to jail records.

 

By DAKE KANG and NG HAN GUAN

WUZHOU, China (AP) — Mud-stained wallets. Bank cards. Official identity cards. Poignant reminders of 132 lives presumed lost were lined up by rescue workers scouring a remote Chinese mountainside Tuesday for the wreckage of a China Eastern flight that one day earlier inexplicably fell from the sky and burst into a huge fireball.

No survivors have been found among the 123 passengers and nine crew members. Video clips posted by China’s state media show small pieces of the Boeing 737-800 plane scattered over a wide forested area, some in green fields, others in burnt-out patches with raw earth exposed after fires burned in the trees. Each piece of debris has a number next to it, the larger ones marked off by police tape.

Search teams planned to work through the night using their hands, picks, sniffer dogs and other equipment to look for survivors, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The steep, rough terrain and the huge size of the debris field were complicating the search for the black box, which holds the flight data and cockpit voice recorder, CCTV and the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Drones were being used to search the fragments of wreckage that were scattered across both sides of the mountain into which the plane crashed, state media reported.

As family members gathered at the destination and departure airports, what caused the plane to drop out of the sky shortly before it would have begun its descent to the southern China metropolis of Guangzhou remained a mystery.

At an evening news conference, a grim-faced Zhu Tao, director of the Office of Aviation Safety at the Civil Aviation Authority of China, said efforts were focused on finding the black box and that it was too early to speculate on a possible cause of the crash.

“As of now, the rescue has yet to find survivors,” Zhu said. “The public security department has taken control of the site.”

Zhu said an air-traffic controller tried to contact the pilots several times after seeing the plane’s altitude drop sharply, but got no reply.

The inability to reach the pilots at such a crucial moment wasn’t itself necessarily a problem, said William Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“If they were dealing with an emergency, pilots are taught to ‘aviate, navigate, then communicate.’ Meaning, fly the airplane first,” Waldock said. “If it was some sort of major mechanical problem, they may have had their hands full trying to control the aircraft.”

The crash left a deep pit in the mountainside about the size of a football field, Xinhua said, citing rescuers. Chen Weihao, who saw the falling plane while working on a farm, told the news agency it hit a gap in the mountain where nobody lived.

“The plane looked to be in one piece when it nosedived. Within seconds, it crashed,” Chen said.

China Eastern flight 5735 crashed outside the city of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region while flying from Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, to Guangzhou, an industrial center not far from Hong Kong on China’s southeastern coast. It ignited a fire big enough to be seen on NASA satellite images before firefighters could extinguished it.

No foreigners were on board the lost flight, the Foreign Ministry said, citing a preliminary review.

Dinglong Culture, a Guangzhou company in both mining and TV and movie production, said in a statement to the Shenzhen stock exchange that its CFO, Fang Fang, was a passenger. Zhongxinghua, an accounting firm used by Dinglong, said that two of its employees were also on the flight.

The crash site is surrounded on three sides by mountains and accessible only by foot and motorcycle on a steep dirt road in the semitropical Guangxi region, famed for some of China’s most spectacular scenery.

Rain fell Tuesday afternoon as excavators dug out a path to make access easier, CCTV said. The steepness of the slope made the positioning of heavy equipment difficult.

A base of operations was set up near the crash site with rescue vehicles, ambulances and an emergency power supply truck parked in the narrow space. Soldiers and rescue workers combed the charred crash site and surrounding heavily dense vegetation.

Police restricted access, checking each vehicle entering Molang, a village near the crash site. Five people with swollen eyes walked out of the village, got into a car and left. Onlookers said they were relatives of the passengers.

Family members gathered at Kunming and Guangzhou airports. People draped in pink blankets and slumped in massage chairs could be seen in a traveler rest area in the basement of the one in Kunming. Workers wheeled in mattresses and brought bagged meals. A security guard blocked an Associated Press journalist from entering, saying that “interviews aren’t being accepted.”

In Guangzhou, relatives were escorted to a reception center staffed by employees wearing full protective gear to guard against the coronavirus.

At least five hotels with more than 700 rooms had been requisitioned in Wuzhou’s Teng county for family members, Chinese media reported.

Workers in hazmat suits set up a registration desk and administered COVID-19 tests at the entrance to one hotel, outside of Molang. A sign read, “The hotel is requisitioned for March 21 plane accident emergency use.” At another hotel, a group of women, some wearing vests with Red Cross markings, registered at a hotel desk set up outside.

The nation’s first fatal plane crash in more than a decade dominated China’s news and social media. World leaders including Great Britain’s Boris Johnson, India’s Narendra Modi and Canada’s Justin Trudeau posted condolences on Twitter.

Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun said that the company was deeply saddened by the news and had offered the full support of its technical experts to assist in the investigation.

“The thoughts of all of us at Boeing are with the passengers and crew members … as well as their families and loved ones,” he wrote in a message to Boeing employees.

The plane was about an hour into its flight, at an altitude of 29,000 feet (8,840 meters), when it entered a steep, fast dive around 2:20 p.m., according to data from FlightRadar24.com. The plane plunged to 7,400 feet before briefly regaining about 1,200 feet in altitude, then dove again. The plane stopped transmitting data 96 seconds after starting to dive.

The aircraft was delivered to the airline in June 2015 and had been flying for more than six years.

Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, where the flight was headed, is one of China’s main aviation hubs. It is the home base for China Southern Airlines. As the pandemic upended air travel, it rocketed past Beijing and Atlanta to claim the title of world’s busiest airport in 2020 — the most recent year for which annual data is available — handling more than 43 million passengers.

Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, home to export-driven factories making smartphones, toys, furniture and other goods. Its Auto City district has joint ventures operated by Toyota, Nissan and others. Kunming, the departure city which is 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) west, is the capital of Yunnan province, an agricultural, mining and tourism center that borders Southeast Asia.

China Eastern, which is headquartered in Shanghai, has grounded all of its 737-800s, China’s Transport Ministry said. Aviation experts said it is unusual to ground an entire fleet of planes unless there is evidence of a problem with the model.

The airline is one of China’s three largest carriers with more than 600 planes, including 109 Boeing 737-800s. The grounding could further disrupt domestic air travel already curtailed because of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in China since the initial peak in early 2020.

The Boeing 737-800 has been flying since 1998 and has an excellent safety record, said Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. It is an earlier model than the 737 Max, which was grounded worldwide for nearly two years after deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Before Monday, the last fatal crash of a Chinese airliner occurred in August 2010, when an Embraer ERJ 190-100 operated by Henan Airlines hit the ground short of the runway in the northeastern city of Yichun and caught fire. It carried 96 people and 44 of them died. Investigators blamed pilot error.

___

Kang reported from Kunming, China. Associated Press researcher Yu Bing and news assistant Caroline Chen in Beijing, researcher Si Chen in Shanghai, video producer Olivia Zhang in Wuzhou, China, writer Adam Schreck in Bangkok and airlines writer David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.

One of six people injured when a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department helicopter went down in the Angeles National Forest remained at a hospital as of Monday, March 21.

The patient was being held for observation, and was one of five deputies who were travelling with a doctor joining them on a ride-along aboard a Sheriff’s Department rescue helicopter Saturday, March 19, LASD officials said Monday afternoon. The other people aboard the aircraft also suffered injuries that were not considered life threatening, and released from treatment at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center over the weekend.

Highway 39 was closed leading up to the site where the helicopter went down as of 5 p.m. Monday evening, LASD Lt. Louis Serrrano said. Authorities were using a crane to get it loaded onto a truck and relocated for further inspection, a task they hoped to complete by sundown. Once that is done, the roadway will be reopened.

“We’re in the process of hoisting it up and getting it out of the area,” Serrano said.

The helicopter was responding to reports of a vehicle collision and attempting to descend onto a turnout near Highway 39 (San Gabriel Canyon Road) and East Fork Road in the mountains north of Azusa. The crew ran into either mechanical or environmental trouble, and experienced a “hard landing” and a “rollover,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told reporters Saturday evening. He added that the helicopter stopped a few feet short of a ledge overlooking a 200-foot fall.

It was not immediately clear what caused the helicopter to go down. The National Transportation Safety Board was investigating, and it may be a year before the agency releases its findings to the public.

The department has two rescue helicopters similar to the one that rolled over on Saturday. Those were scheduled for a thorough inspection after the crash; sheriff’s officials were unable to specify if the aircraft were cleared for service as of Monday.

Villanueva said each of the department’s three rescue helicopters conducts hundreds of missions each year, and the loss of even one will create a challenge.

A Santa Clarita woman pleaded guilty Monday, March 21, to charges stemming from a wrong-way collision in a stolen pickup truck that crashed into four vehicles on the Foothill Freeway in Claremont and left one man dead and several others injured in 2018.

Nicole Danielle Thibault, 32, was immediately sentenced to 30 years and eight months in state prison following her plea to one count each of voluntary manslaughter and grand-theft auto, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, and eight counts of attempted murder, according to Deputy District Attorney Phil Stirling.

The sentence included a lifetime ban of Thibault’s driving privileges, along with $20,000 restitution and a waiver of her appellate rights, the prosecutor said.

Thibault stole a parked Ford F-150 in San Bernardino on Jan. 22, 2018, then drove through red lights and at unsafe speeds before entering the 210, where she drove westbound in the eastbound lanes for about 20 miles before the head-on collision that killed Daniel Castillo, 69, of Fontana, authorities said.

The 2011 pickup truck was reported to have been taken about 3:25 p.m. that day — with the owner’s 2-year-old son inside the vehicle — near a 7-Eleven store on Highland Avenue and H Street, according to the California Highway Patrol. The youngster was subsequently dropped off at Temple and H streets.

About 3:45 that afternoon, CHP dispatchers “received numerous calls of a wrong-way driver traveling westbound on the eastbound lanes of SR-210, within the center median shoulder,” according to the agency.

The truck then veered into oncoming traffic.

Thibault, among those injured in the crash, was arrested by the CHP and has remained jailed since.

LOS ANGELES — Police sought the public’s help Monday to identify a hit-and-run Tesla driver who crashed while attempting a stunt on an extremely steep Los Angeles street while spectators recorded videos.

The incident occurred at 12:10 a.m. Sunday in the hilly Echo Park area, according to a police statement.

The rented Tesla sped up a street and jumped over the cross street at the top of the hill and descended down the equally steep other side of the hill, crashing into trash cans and two parked vehicles.

Spectators recorded the scene and posted videos on social media accounts. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Traffic Division posted some of the videos on its YouTube account.

The department said the Tesla was abandoned at the scene and there was no description of the driver.

“A misdemeanor hit-and-run (investigation) was completed, and detectives will be following up with the renter,” the police statement said.

By Cedar Attanasio, Jill Bleed and Anita Snow | Associated Press

HOBBS, N.M. — A 13-year-old was driving the pickup truck that struck a van in West Texas in a fiery collision that killed nine people, including six members of a college golf team and their coach, a National Transportation Safety Board official said Thursday.

The child and a man traveling in the truck also died.

The truck’s left front tire, which was a spare tire, also blew out before impact, said NTSB Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg.

Although it was unclear how fast the two vehicles were traveling, “this was clearly a high-speed collision,” Landsberg said. He added investigators hoped to retrieve enough information from the vehicle’s recorders to better understand what happened.

One must be 14 in Texas to start taking classroom courses for a learner’s license and 15 to receive that provisional license to drive with an instructor or licensed adult in the vehicle. Department of Public Safety Sgt. Victor Taylor said a 13-year-old driving would be breaking the law.

The pickup truck crossed into the opposite lane on a darkened, two-lane highway before colliding head-on with a van, killing the boy, a man traveling with him, six New Mexico college students and a golf coach.

It’s not uncommon for people in rural parts of the U.S. to learn to drive when they’re young. But the news that a 13-year-old was behind the wheel in the Texas crash put a renewed focus on the practice.

The University of the Southwest students, including one from Portugal and one from Mexico, and the coach were returning from a golf tournament when the vehicles collided Tuesday night. Two Canadian students were hospitalized in critical condition.

The NTSB sent an investigative team to the crash site in Texas’ Andrews County, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of the New Mexico state line. While the area is rural, its roads can often be busy with traffic related to agriculture and oil and gas development.

University of the Southwest spokeswoman Maria Duarte declined to comment on the NTSB’s announcement about the young driver, citing the ongoing investigation.

The golf teams were traveling in a 2017 Ford Transit van that was towing a box trailer when it collided with the truck, and both vehicles burst into flames, according to NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss.

He said the vehicles crashed on a two-lane asphalt highway where the speed limit is 75 mph (120 kph), though investigators have not yet determined how fast either vehicle was traveling.

The Texas Department of Public Safety identified the deceased as: Golf coach Tyler James, 26, of Hobbs, New Mexico; and players Mauricio Sanchez, 19, of Mexico; Travis Garcia, 19, of Pleasanton, Texas; Jackson Zinn, 22, of Westminster, Colorado; Karisa Raines, 21, of Fort Stockton, Texas; Laci Stone, 18, of Nocona, Texas; and Tiago Sousa, 18, of Portugal.

Also killed were Henrich Siemens, 38, of Seminole County, Texas, and the unidentified 13-year-old boy who were in the 2007 Dodge 2500 pickup.

Critically injured aboard the van were Canadian students Dayton Price, 19, of Mississauga, Ontario, and Hayden Underhill, 20, of Amherstview, Ontario. Both were taken by helicopter to the University Medical Center in Lubbock, about 110 miles (180 kilometers) to the northeast.

“They are both stable and recovering and every day making more and more progress,” University of the Southwest Provost Ryan Tipton said Thursday of the two injured students.

“One of the students is eating chicken soup,” said Tipton, calling their recovery “a game of inches.”

Tipton said University President Quint Thurman visited the students’ parents at the hospital, illustrating the close community at the college with only about 350 on-campus students.Underhill’s brother Drew said their parents, Ken and Wendy, flew to Texas.

“Hockey was a big part of life for a while, but his true passion is golf,” Drew Underhill said.

On Thursday evening, about 150 people turned out to remember Zinn at Texas Roadhouse, a Hobbs restaurant where he worked and met his girlfriend of five months.

“We met here exactly at this table,” said Maddy Russell, 20, of Hobbs. “He was my heart.”

The mourners released around 100 blue and orange balloons into the cold, whipping wind of eastern New Mexico, and they soon disappeared into the horizon.

The Mexican Federation of Golf posted an online note of condolence to the loved ones of Sanchez.

Sousa was from Portugal’s southern coast, where he graduated from high school last summer before heading to college in the U.S., said Renata Afonso, head of the Escola Secundária de Loulé.”Any school would be delighted to have had him as a student,” she said.

Team member Jasmin Collum had been scheduled to play but at the last minute decided instead to visit her parents in Houston, her mother said.

“We knew all those people on board,” Tonya Collum said. “Basically the whole team is gone or in the hospital.”

The University of the Southwest is a private, Christian college in Hobbs, New Mexico, near the state line with Texas.

A memorial was set up Wednesday at the course near campus where the team practices. There were flowers, golf balls and a handmade sign with a cross and the initials USW.

“It’s the very least we could to for the players, and of course Coach James,” said Rockwind Community Links Manager Ben Kirkes.

The university said on Twitter that counseling and religious services would be available on campus.

The teams had been taking part in a golf tournament at Midland College, about 315 miles (505 kilometers) west of Dallas. Midland College canceled Wednesday’s play because of the crash.