The names of the six people who died in a single-car accident on Highway 101 south of Los Alamos on Feb. 19 were released Tuesday by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department coroner.
Because several of the victims were badly burned, detectives had to rely on dental records to make positive identifications of the six, five of whom lived out of the country, said Sgt. Gregg Weitzman of the coroner’s office.
The dead were identified as Brandt Martin Cannici, 30, of San Francisco; Ruzanna Movsesovna Militonyan, 20, of Russia; Nicia Chloé Oberle, 20, of France; Angélique Barbara Rolin, 25, of France; Constance Vadepied, 18, of France; and Elif Yilmaz, 25, of Turkey, Weitzman said.
“This was a tremendously difficult and challenging case. Our detectives worked through foreign embassies to contact the victim’s families, which provided medical and dental records that were then translated into English,’’ Weitzman said.
The California Highway Patrol is continuing to investigate the cause of the crash, which apparently occurred when the driver lost control of the SUV, which rolled and burst into flames. The driver was the sole survivor of the accident, and was identified as Jeanne Ostrowski, 19, of San Francisco, according to the CHP.
Five of the victims and the survivor of the crash were students at Embassy Center for English Studies in San Francisco. Cannici was not a student.
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