(The following story by Laurie Lucas appeared on The Press-Enterprise website on July 30.)
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The young woman driver who died last year in a freak train accident in the early morning hours after Halloween had a blood alcohol level exceeding the legal limit, according to the coroner’s investigation.
Renee Ammari, 23, the driver of the 1996 Honda Passport SUV, and her best friend, Tanya Sayegh, 18, both of San Bernardino, died after the car become wedged between train tracks and a cement retaining wall in Riverside on the west side of the tracks.
Ammari mistakenly turned onto the rocky shoulder parallel to the tracks at Mission Inn and Santa Fe avenues and tried to make a U-turn back to Mission Inn Avenue.
A northbound 86-car train struck the car at 1:18 a.m. Nov. 1, dragged the wreckage and crushed the two women, according to police reports. Both young women died of multiple blunt force traumatic injuries.
A toxicology report from the Riverside County coroner’s office said the blood alcohol level of Ammari was 0.15 percent, almost twice California’s presumed level of intoxication is 0.08. Sayegh’s blood alcohol concentration was 0.03, according to the Bio-Tox Lab report.
Ammari’s older sister, Rita Wright, said in an interview last November that the women had dressed in costumes to celebrate Halloween at Café Sevilla, a nightclub and restaurant in Riverside. Sayegh worked as a hostess at Las Campanas at the Mission Inn until 10 p.m.
The coroner’s report also contained information from Kurt Blodgett, the investigating officer from the Union Pacific Railroad Police.
Blodgett talked to Hilario Cardona, a security guard for BNSF Railway tracks. Cardona said that morning he saw two women on the tracks behind the SUV a few minutes before the accident. “The victims appeared to be looking around on the ground,” Cardona said.
The SUV faced southwest on the BNSF track No. 1. When Cardona saw the northbound Union Pacific train traveling 35 mph collide with the SUV, he called 9-1-1.
Conductor Glen Lee Holmes said that when he saw a black SUV in the pathway of the train, he sounded the whistle. He saw a young woman standing at the rear of the vehicle a second before the collision and tried immediately to stop the train.
According to the coroner’s report, the train’s video camera recorded a female standing next to the passenger door of the SUV “facing the oncoming train with her hands lifted to her chest.”
Seconds before the train struck, “a female exited the driver side of the vehicle, closed the door behind her, moved quickly over the train tracks in front of the oncoming train to the passenger side of the vehicle,” the report said.
The video also reveals tire tracks from the SUV, “showing that the vehicle went over two sets of train tracks before coming to a stop.”
Burial for both young women was in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Covina. Sayegh would have turned 19 Saturday. Her family said they plan to honor her birthday at the cemetery.