A woman was killed this morning in Suffolk when her car ran off the road and smashed into the same large oak tree that was hit by another vehicle in a fatal crash on Saturday, authorities said.
The latest victim, whose name was not released, was driving alone in a Mercedes sedan along U.S. Route 58 about 6 a.m. when her car ran off the right side of the roadway, Suffolk spokeswoman Debbie George said. She said the woman appeared to have been talking on a cell phone when the wreck happened.
The officer investigating the crash realized the tree was the same one involved in a crash he had investigated Saturday in which a 7-month-old boy was killed and his mother critically injured, George said.
In that earlier crash, the boy's 26-year-old father, Joshua Lovelace, apparently fell asleep at the wheel just before hitting the tree, police said. The father was not seriously injured, but the boy died after being thrown from the vehicle, and his mother, 23-year-old Ashley Lovelace, remains in critical condition at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. The family dog also died in the wreck.
George said the family apparently was traveling through Suffolk en route to the Maryland-Delaware area.
The big oak is one of numerous large trees lining the highway along a rural stretch of Route 58, George said, and the fact that two cars hit it in three days appears to be just a "tragic coincidence."
After the second crash, Suffolk dispatched a traffic engineer to the scene to see whether the oak presented an unusual traffic hazard, but there was no evidence of that, George said. The primary cause of both accidents appears to have been driver inattention, she said.
-- Bill Geroux
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