Boulder Thrown From Overpass Kills Young Dad

'This shouldn’t have happened this way'
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 16, 2018 12:12 PM CDT
Boulder Thrown From Overpass Kills Young Dad
This photo provided by the California Highway Patrol shows the smashed windshield of a car in which a man died on Tuesday, March 13, 2018.   (CHP Altadena via AP)

A 23-year-old man who had just found out his wife was pregnant with their second child was killed Tuesday in California when a boulder crashed through the windshield of his family's car, CBS Los Angeles reports. "He was so excited," the Los Angeles Times quotes 21-year-old Guadalupe Gutierrez as saying about her husband, Christopher Lopez. "Now he's gone." Gutierrez was driving the family's 2017 Toyota Corolla under a freeway overpass around 9pm Tuesday in Pasadena when a 35-pound boulder came through the windshield, striking Lopez in the passenger seat. She drove him to the hospital, where he died. Also in the car were Gutierrez's mother and the couple's 4-year-old daughter. No one else was injured.

"This was an intentional act," Lt. Chuck Geletko of the California Highway Patrol said during a press conference Thursday. "We need help from the public to find the person who committed this atrocious act." Investigators are trying to get DNA off the boulder, as well as reviewing camera footage and interviewing homeless people in the area. "This was an innocent family driving home," the Pasadena Star-News quotes Geletko as saying. "Because of a careless person or persons, their lives will forever be changed." Lopez's father asked anyone who knows anything to come forward and help give the family closure. “This shouldn’t have happened this way,” Francisco Lopez said Thursday. “He’s a young father who was just with his family.”
(More California stories.)

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