Driver Dies When Car Hits Parked Truck

A woman was killed after her car hit a truck and caught fire, and another motorist apparently escaped serious injury when a high-speed chase ended with his smashing into a freeway’s center divider in separate San Fernando Valley traffic accidents early Thursday, authorities said.

In the first crash, a 31-year-old Los Angeles woman driving on the Foothill Freeway near Sunland apparently fell asleep and drifted off the roadway about 2:40 a.m., a California Highway Patrol spokesman said.

When her 1989 Ford Probe slammed into the rear of a parked tractor-trailer rig, the car’s fuel tank ignited and the woman was trapped inside the burning car.

The woman’s name has not been released pending notification of relatives.

The truck’s driver, Castro Majais, 45, of Mexicali, Mexico, who had pulled over to sleep, was unharmed, said CHP spokesman Rich Obregon. Majais might be charged, Obregon said, because sleeping in a vehicle on a freeway shoulder is illegal.

About 40 minutes later, on the Ventura Freeway in Sherman Oaks, a suspected drunken driver in a stolen Mustang tried to outrace pursuing CHP officers in a chase that approached speeds of 120 m.p.h. After the man crashed the car into the back of another vehicle and the center divider, he got out and escaped by dashing across four northbound lanes of traffic before police arrived, said CHP Officer David King.

“He was saved because the car had an air bag,” King said.

The man whose vehicle he rear-ended, Gabriel Torres, 22, of Pico Rivera, suffered a scalp cut and a facial fracture, King said.