Victim ID’d in Pojoaque fatal crash
Albuquerque woman died in incident that injured five others
Lucy Fresques, 71, of Albuquerque was the motorist who died Friday in a crash north of Santa Fe on Friday that involved three cars, tangled traffic for hours and resulted in injuries to five other people, including the victim’s husband, Robert Fresques, officials said.
Santa Fe Sheriff ’s Department spokesman Juan Ríos said Monday that investigators still have not interviewed Elias Arellano, 18, of Española, whom police believe caused the crash when he lost control of his Chrysler Sebring convertible while traveling north on U.S. 84/285.
Arellano’s vehicle collided head-on with Fresques and her husband, sending them careening into a third vehicle carrying Mario Garcia, 25, and Leobardo Maya, 19, both of Edwards, Colo. Both suffered minor injuries in the crash.
Ríos said Arellano and his passenger — a juvenile who was airlifted to University of New Mexico Hospital after the accident and whose identity police have not
released — were riding with the top down and were not wearing seat belts at the time of the crash. As a result, Ríos said, both were ejected from their vehicle. One landed in the southbound lanes of traffic and the other one in the northbound lanes.
Ríos said the injured people in both lanes of traffic was one of the factors that made it difficult for officials to quickly clear the scene and get traffic flowing again. Both northbound and southbound travelers faced hourslong delays for much of Friday evening.
“It was a convergence of various factors that led to the delay,” Ríos said.
A variety of other factors contributed to complexity of clearing the crash, Ríos said, including the fatality; the fact that it was near the end of a workday; an investigation in both directions of the road; the lack of a nearby exit in the northbound lane that would have allowed traffic to be diverted to the frontage road.
“We had to take measurements, we had to take pictures, interview people, it was a tough scene,” Ríos said. “It’s not the same as any other type of motor vehicle accident. It’s unfortunate that people were inconvenienced. But we were dealing with a situation where a human being lost their life and others were seriously injured. That’s the priority.”
New Mexico Department of Transportation spokeswoman Rosanne Rodriguez did not specifically address a list of questions sent by the The New Mexican regarding the use of concrete barriers and the reason there is not a concrete barrier between southbound and northbound traffic on the stretch of road between Pojoaque and Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino, where the crash took place.
But she said in an email statement: “The road meets standards and currently no projects are planned for this area.”
Neither state police nor the Department of Transportation responded to questions about what collaborative planning, if any, the agencies do to prepare for emergencies such as the multicar accident that backed up traffic for miles in both directions and left some motorists stranded for up to five hours.
Ríos did respond, saying there essentially is none.
“I don’t think there is any planning, per se,” he said. “Typically, the lead agency will respond to the fatal accident, other agencies may be brought in, but no there is no grand scheme. The different agencies will communicate through the dispatch center to determine where people need to be in position, where road needs to be blocked off. It’s done there on scene in the moment.”
Ríos said the sheriff ’s department has decided to start pushing notifications it normally sends via its text-based alert system Nixle to Facebook and Twitter in order to communicate information to more people in the future.
Ríos said police believe speed was a factor in the accident but they don’t suspect Arellano was under the influence, though the investigation is not finished. No one has been cited in the crash.
Ríos said the two Colorado men had been released from the hospital but he did not have updates on the conditions of the other people who where injured.
Ríos said state police also handled a minor traffic accident that occurred during the traffic snarl that followed the accident.