Authorities on Tuesday publicly named eight people who died following San Diego-area traffic accidents over the first few days of 2025 — four of them on New Year’s Day.
The first two deaths occurred late on the morning of Jan. 1, according to the county Medical Examiner’s Office.
The victims, 20-year-old cousins Nadia Charles and Joseph Saint Juste Jr., were standing on the southeast corner of Buena Vista Avenue and Broadway in Lemon Grove at about 11:15 a.m. An eastbound Acura sedan collided with a southbound Toyota in the intersection, then careened onto the roadside and struck them, the agency reported.
Saint Juste died at the scene. Doctors pronounced Charles, who, like Saint Juste, lived with family in Lemon Grove, dead at a hospital a short time later.
A GoFundMe page supporting their family can be viewed here.
Shortly before 6 p.m. on New Year’s Day, a Hyundai sedan struck Marcos Perez Domingo, 45, as he was riding a bicycle on Encinitas Boulevard, according to the medical examiner.
Paramedics took the Encinitas resident to Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, where he died two days later.
About a half-hour after that fatal collision, Akash Kasibhatla, 33, was hit by a Toyota sedan as he walked in the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 near Birmingham Drive in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, the county agency reported. Kasibhatla died at the scene.
On Friday, at about 5:30 a.m., police officers responding to a report of loud noise that sounded like a car crash found Joshua Summerhill, 31, in a Jeep SUV had struck a tree in a roundabout at Hospitality Point Park in the 1400 block of Quivira Way.
Summerhill, whose residence remains unknown, died at the scene.
The final three deaths took place Sunday. At about 3:30 that morning, Tayden Fosness, 29, was riding a motorcycle that crashed into a disabled Toyota sedan at the site of an earlier collision on northbound Interstate 15 near Miramar Way. Fosness died before medics could transport him to a hospital.
That afternoon, a collision between two motorcycles on a rural roadway near Palomar Mountain claimed two more lives.
The riders, Peter Mison, 68, of Fallbrook and Archie Slaven III, 71, of Escondido, both died at the scene of the 1:30 p.m. crash, on East Grade Road in Pauma Valley.
Updated at 9:40 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025
