Josephine Sciarrino, 45, of Stamford, was driving on I-95 North Greenwich at 9:50 p.m. when she collided with another vehicle.
Police said that Sciarrino’s car was pushed by a Mercedes into a tractor-trailer that was parked on the right shoulder of the highway just past Exit 2. Stamford woman dies in Greenwich crash
Because the bottom of a truck is higher than the bumper of passenger vehicles, when there is a collision the smaller vehicle easily slides under the truck and the first point of impact is the windshield. Seatbelts, airbags, and car crumple zones do not function as intended in underride crashes —front, side, and rear — leaving passenger vehicle occupants vulnerable to life-threatening injuries.
See Underride Crash Memorials posted here and at #STOPunderrides Tweets. To add photos or more information on this story or to add other underride crashes to be remembered, send an email to underridemap@gmail.com. Please use this Interactive Underride Crash Map Crash Location Input Form to provide us with accurate information . (Note: the map is currently not online; but we would keep the information for future updating and to aid in underride advocacy efforts.)
Support improving Underride Protection on trailers: Contact your legislators with this User-Friendly TAKE ACTION online tool.
Please sign this petition: Congress, Act Now To End Deadly Truck Underrides.
Note: In order to raise awareness and preserve the memories of underride victims — precious ones gone too soon — I have been writing memorial posts on what appear to me to be underride crashes. I am not a crash reconstructionist, and I do not have all the facts on these crashes; but I think that underride should be investigated as a potential factor in truck crash injuries and deaths.
She was a direct colleague of mine. Wonderful person, full of life.
When I Googled her I hadn’t expected to reach a site about the particular circumstances (which evidently are a recurring problem).
I am taken back to 1979 in Journalism grad school in California. A bunch of classmates went from Berkeley to SF to cover a Board of Supervisors (=Calif. version of City Council) meeting. One of us went home separately from the rest of us because he had to leave in time for his karate class.
Next day in class we read of his tragic death. He was riding his bicycle and got run over by a bus.
The journalism class investigated the accident and discovered it was caused by storm-drain crossbars on most Berkeley streets that pointed in same direction as traffic AND were wide enough for a bicycle wheel to fall through the spaces between the bars. The bus was stopped at a bus stop, he aimed to ride past to its right between bus and sidewalk, his wheel fell between storm-drain bars and he was hurled forward onto the ground. Bus driver had no way of seeing this, and when bus started up again his head was crushed.
Our class’s story persuaded the city to install perpendicular cross-members across all the city’s storm drains so the same thing could never happen again.