By Andrew Dalton
The Associated Press
GORMAN, Calif. — A truck carrying a prison inmate wildfire crew collided head-on with a car on a narrow highway north of Los Angeles, killing an inmate and the driver of the car and injuring the truck’s 12 other occupants, authorities said.
Authorities were investigating why the elderly man driving the Subaru wagon with Nevada plates veered across the yellow line on Tuesday, triggering a crash that caused the truck to overturn on Highway 138 near Interstate 5 south of Gorman, California Highway Patrol spokesman David Lutz said.
The Subaru driver, whose name has not been released, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The dead inmate, Fernando Sanchez, 25, was ejected out of the back of the truck. He was from San Diego County and had been sent to prison for possession and sale of narcotics, California prisons spokesman George Kostyrko said. He would have been up for parole in January 2012.
Four inmates were critically injured and eight people, including a Los Angeles County Fire Department firefighter who drove the truck and served as the crew’s leader, had minor-to-moderate injuries, officials said.
Fire Capt. Mark Savage said when the first rescue engine arrived at the narrow rural highway, three of the inmates were pinned underneath the truck. A truck towing a forklift happened to be caught in the traffic backed up by the crash. A firefighter asked the truck driver to unload the forklift, and he freed the trapped inmates.
“They saved those folks,” Savage said. “It would have taken 45 minutes to get heavy equipment to that remote location.”
The low-security inmates would not have been handcuffed, and there were no attempts to escape, fire Inspector Frederic Stowers said.
The crew was headed back to their camp near the crash site in San Francisquito Canyon in Saugus after completing a project, Savage said.
They were riding in a crew-carrying vehicle or CCV, which has a cabin front and an enclosed back with air conditioning and bench seating.
The county and the California Department of Corrections work together to maintain 10 such camps throughout Los Angeles County, where inmates battle wildfires, and work on brush clearing and construction projects.
“This is a bad day for LAFD, we lost an extended family member who worked hand-in-hand with our firefighting crews,” Savage said.