San Jose man killed in wrong-way crash on highway near Modesto
The westbound pickup entered the eastbound lane of Highway 132 and crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer rig.
A San Jose man was killed in a wrong-way crash on a rural highway west of Modesto, the California Highway Patrol said.
Gilberto Llamas-Gutierrez, 28, was reportedly driving a Nissan pickup westbound on Highway 132 early on the morning of Thursday, April 13. Around 2:40 a.m., when the truck was west of the community of Twin Rivers, it entered the eastbound lane and crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer rig.
Llamas-Gutierrez died at the scene.
The rig’s driver, a 32-year-old Lodi man, suffered minor injuries, as did one of his passengers, a 33-year-old Lodi woman. A 3-year-old boy who was seatbelted in the rig’s sleeper berth was not injured.
Four days earlier, on April 9, two people were killed in another head-on crash about 8 miles west on Highway 132.
In that incident, the CHP said, a 28-year-old man from San Leandro was driving a Mercedes-Benz west in the highway’s eastbound lane near the community of Vernalis around 3:15 a.m. The Mercedes collided head-on with an eastbound Kia driven by a 20-year-old woman from Modesto.
Two passengers in the Kia, a man and a woman from Modesto, were killed. The drivers of the Kia and the Mercedes suffered major injuries.
Both drivers were arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol.
That stretch of Highway 132 — Maze Boulevard and Vernalis Road — is a two-lane road through agricultural land between Modesto and Interstate 580 south of Tracy. The speed limit is 55 mph.