Crowd watches car plunge off cliff; 2 die

BODEGA BAY, Calif. — Dozens of people at a popular Northern California coastal overlook watched as an SUV drove through a parking lot without braking and then plunged off a cliff onto the rocks below, killing two women, investigators said Monday.

The cause of the weekend crash was still under investigation, California Highway Patrol Officer David de Rutte said. Initial witness accounts indicated that the vehicle drove through a wooden barrier in a large parking area at the Bodega Head trail before it went off the cliff.

“Witnesses saw the vehicle driving through the parking lot — and it just kept driving,” De Rutte said. “It didn’t stop. There was no accelerating, but also no braking.”

When rescuers made it down to the Toyota SUV, which had landed on its roof on the rocks about 100 feet below, both women were dead.

Authorities identified the driver as Maria Teixeira, 64, and the passenger as Elizabeth Correia, 41, both from the San Francisco Bay Area city of Dublin, about 100 miles south of the crash site.

The Mercury News reported that they were mother and daughter, both employees of public schools in the Bay Area, according to relatives and sheriff’s officials.

Teixeira was lead custodian at Montevideo Elementary in San Ramon, and Correia was a first-grade teacher at Lydiksen Elementary in Pleasanton.

Investigators were trying to determine whether the crash was intentional, De Rutte said.