The driver of the doomed limo carrying a newlywed bride and eight friends revealed grim details of the late night ride that became a fiery death trap.
Orville Brown said he was initially confused when one of the women tapped on the partition and mentioned smoke.
The music was turned up as the friends — in their 30s and 40s — celebrated a girls night out, and he told the women they couldn’t light up inside the car.
It was just after 10 p.m. Saturday as the 1999 Lincoln Town Car rumbled over a San Francisco Bay bridge. The women knocked on the partition again, Brown said.
“They were shouting, ‘Smoke, smoke!’ and ‘Pull over, pull over!’” Brown, who began driving as a chauffeur two months ago, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
One of the dead was identified as Neriza Fojas, 31, a registered nurse from Fresno who
recently wed and was planning to travel to her native Philippines to hold another ceremony
before family. Her friends in the limo were fellow nurses.
Brown told investigators he picked the women up in Oakland and was taking them across the
bridge to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Foster City.
Fojas’ sister, Rosalyn Bersamin, told the Chronicle that after a night out on the town, Fojas
and her friends were heading to the hotel to party with her husband.
“She was a hard worker, a loving sister,” a sobbing Bersamin said.
Labels: limo fire, newly wed dies
