Off-Duty ER Nurse Stopped to Help a Crash Victim on the Freeway. She Never Made It Home.

Image source: CBS8

According to CBS8, Nereida “Nedi” Benitez, an emergency room nurse with Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, had just finished an overnight shift and was driving home to Temecula when she stopped on the side of Interstate 15 near SR-76 to help after a crash. She never made it home.

Benitez and a second good Samaritan, 54-year-old Marine veteran Chad Tillman, were both struck and killed in the early morning hours of Thursday, June 11, on northbound I-15 near State Route 76 in Fallbrook, 10News reported. The two stopped independently to help someone they had never met after the crash.

Her husband told CBS8 that stopping to help was in keeping with who she was, describing a wife who “runs away from no battle.” For colleagues who knew her, it was a heartbreaking but unsurprising final act from someone who had spent her career running toward emergencies.

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The crash unfolded just after 4 a.m. A Toyota minivan was rear-ended by a Honda CR-V driven by a 21-year-old, sending the CR-V into the freeway median, according to 10News. Benitez and Tillman both pulled over and were on the driver’s side of the disabled Honda when another vehicle slammed into it, striking both of them. They died at the scene.

Authorities have identified the Honda’s driver as 21-year-old Jake Lopez Lawrence, who was booked into the Vista Detention Facility on suspicion of felony DUI and gross vehicular manslaughter. He was scheduled to be arraigned this week. The charges are allegations that have not been proven in court, and the California Highway Patrol’s investigation is ongoing.

Tillman, a Fallbrook resident and 12-year Marine veteran who worked as a trucker, was remembered the same way Benitez was: as someone who could not drive past a person in need. “He was just being Chad, being who he is, doing what he could to help out,” his co-worker Cody Willingham told 10News, calling the loss a reminder of “how fragile life is.”

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Benitez did not take an easy road into nursing. She started her career nearly a year into the pandemic and spent two years in COVID units before moving into the emergency department, first at Sharp Grossmont Hospital and then at Sharp Memorial. She was not done climbing. She had recently secured an Air Force enlistment as a step toward her dream of becoming a flight nurse.

Her colleagues are reeling. “It’s been like a shock that one of us is gone,” Sharp nursing manager Tania Jones told 10News, recalling Benitez as “a nurse, always caring and compassionate.” Jones said Benitez had been both excited and nervous about the Air Force, telling her, “Thank you for believing in me.”

A visitation for Benitez is scheduled for June 18, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., at Miller-Jones Mortuary in Murrieta. She leaves behind her husband and family, along with a hospital unit full of co-workers grieving a nurse they describe as a shining light.

The instinct that made Benitez a beloved ER nurse is the same instinct that put her on the shoulder of I-15 at 4 a.m. Nurses are wired to run toward emergencies, and that wiring does not switch off at the end of a shift. But roadside scenes are among the most dangerous places a person can stand. Highway incidents involving people outside their vehicles are frequently deadly, and good Samaritans, tow operators, and first responders are struck on American roads every year.

Emergency medicine experts generally advise that off-duty clinicians who stop at a crash protect themselves first: park well clear of traffic, stay behind a barrier when possible, turn on hazards, and let trained scene-management crews position vehicles before approaching. California’s Good Samaritan protections shield medical aid given in good faith, but no law can shield a person from a moving vehicle. Benitez’s death is also a reminder of how thin the line is between the helper and the patient, and of the toll these losses take on the units left behind.

For a profession that absorbs other people’s worst days for a living, the death of a colleague who died trying to help is a particularly hard kind of grief, and a reason to talk openly about scene safety, peer support, and the cost of always being the one who runs in.

🤔 Would you stop to help at a crash scene on your drive home from a shift? Tell us in the comments below.