Dying woman drags herself to side of road and uses last words to name killers, California police say

Victim, 19, discovered covered in blood by four delivery workers on route north of San Jose

Authorities say this is where four UPS workers found a woman who had been stabbed and dumped north of San Jose (Alameda County Sheriff’s Office/The Washington Post)

When the four delivery workers found the woman in the middle of the road, she was covered in so much blood that they couldn't tell the colour of her hair.

Whoever had done this to her, authorities said later, had stabbed the 19-year-old repeatedly, then thrown her out of a car near a remote, hilly road north of San Jose, California, leaving her for dead.

But she wasn't.

And in the two hours between when she was found and her death Monday morning, she managed to give investigators evidence that could send those suspected of killing her to prison for the rest of their lives.

“Her internal fortitude, to stay alive and to fight, is pretty remarkable,” Alameda County Sheriff's Office Sergeant Ray Kelly told The San Francisco Chronicle. “This young woman clung to life when she was left for dead and was able to live for another couple hours and get us that information. Ultimately that led us to these arrests.”

Authorities planned to release more details about the case, the sheriff's office said in a news release, including the name of the victim and charges for the suspects, who have yet to be identified.

The woman had crawled nearly 100 yards - the length of a football field - to get to the road, where she had some chance of being seen by people in passing cars. Authorities determined the distance by measuring a trail of drying blood.

“You could tell it was so bad to where you just had to give her comfort,” Richard Loadholt, one of the UPS employees who had been riding with three other men on Tesla Road, told Sacramento Fox affiliate KTXL. Initially, he said he and his workmates thought she was missing an arm. “She fought like a soldier. Like a warrior.”

The hilly, winding road where she was found is a popular alternative to Interstate 580 for people travelling between Livermore and Tracy, according to Bay-area news station KRON. It was also virtually deserted in the predawn hours of Monday.

About 2am, the UPS workers sent another driver to an area where there was better cellphone reception to relay information to authorities.

When they got there, they decided the best option was to airlift the dying woman to a hospital with an advanced trauma centre. But as first responders tried to save her, investigators asked her questions. The most important one: Who did this?

“I've been around a long time, and I can only think of two to three times that I'm aware of in our agency that we've been able to get a dying declaration like that,” Kelly said.

In the legal world, a dying declaration is a statement made by someone who believes they will be dead soon. It's an exception to the legal rule forbidding hearsay in court testimony, and it can hold tremendous sway in a case.

In this one, it led to arrests just a few hours after the teen was declared dead.

Around 10am Monday, the two suspects were arrested at a home in Modesto, about an hour from where the stabbed woman had been found.

“We were able to act on the information from our victim,” Kelly said.

The Washington Post