Traffic Accidents

Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary was trying to revive his wife in the middle of the road when a witness came upon his smashed-up car on a rural state highway near Ojai. "He was yelling, 'Don't die, Gretchen! Don't die!,' " said former Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury, one of the first witnesses on the scene after the single-car crash early Sunday that left one man dead and Avary's wife, Gretchen, seriously injured.

A suspected robber discovered Thursday that karma can arrive on the front bumper of a Chevy pickup. According to police, one of two men suspected of robbing a motorist in Anaheim was accidentally run over by the victim as the suspect tried to elude police. "It was bad timing on the suspect's part," said Anaheim Police Sgt. Rick Martinez.

More than 10 years after the deaths of Britain's "people's princess" and her lover in a Paris car crash, the few who believe Princess Diana was deliberately killed continue to press their case in a coroner's inquest now in its fifth month. The inquiry, highlighted by a series of new details about Diana's loves and the last minutes of her life, has riveted a nation that after a decade had seemingly sated itself on Diana headlines.

A herd of horses trotted onto the 91 Freeway in Corona early Monday, causing two collisions that killed one of the animals, forced authorities to close the road for roughly five hours and left three motorists with minor injuries. The horses, about a dozen in all, escaped from Hart Ranch and a neighboring property and bolted several hundred yards in the predawn darkness to the freeway, near Green River Road, said Donna Hart, co-owner of the ranch.

In a strange discovery Sunday morning, California Highway Patrol officers who were investigating what they thought was a wild car crash instead found a homicide. About 8:15 a.m., officers were called to the Ventura Freeway just east of Van Nuys Boulevard, where a sedan had crashed into the sound wall and flipped several times. When officers looked in the car, they found a man who had been shot in the head. "It's very odd," said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Cecil Manresa.

While Kim Lundell was studying religion in the United States, her teenage son in South Korea drowned. His death prompted her to start a church for young Koreans in Los Angeles County. Walnut Blessing Church of the Nazarene became just that, with high school and college students making up about 70% of the roughly 100 congregants. Many are recent immigrants whose parents are divorced and work long hours at low-wage jobs. "The church is their home," Lundell said.

After deliberating only a few hours, an Orange County jury Monday convicted a Long Beach man of murder in the death of a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who was killed in a traffic collision after swerving out of the path of a stove -- allegedly stolen from a construction site -- that tumbled out of the man's pickup.

The owner of six Los Angeles-area medical marijuana dispensaries was arrested by federal agents Tuesday after an investigation sparked by a traffic accident in which a motorist allegedly high on one of the dispensaries' products plowed into a parked SUV, killing the driver and paralyzing a California Highway Patrol officer. In the aftermath of the Dec.

Los Angeles police Saturday arrested an Inglewood man believed to be the driver of a Jaguar involved in a five-car, high-speed crash Friday night in which two people died in Baldwin Village. German Maximo, 22, was arrested at his home on suspicion of felony hit and run. He "fled the scene without rendering aid," said Los Angeles Police Officer Norma Eisenman.

One person was killed and three injured when an SUV plowed into a crowd on a Venice sidewalk Sunday afternoon in front of St. Mark Catholic Church. The driver, who had just attended Mass, told witnesses and police that she accidentally stepped on the accelerator when her daughter, a passenger, suffered a seizure. Witnesses described a scene of pandemonium as the silver Nissan drove up onto a sidewalk filled with churchgoers, pinning a man against a flower bed and striking several women.