A Pittsburgh woman who died in January after her SUV plunged into the icy Monongahela River from the Parkway East was intoxicated, speeding and driving erratically at the time of the crash, Pennsylvania State Police said Tuesday.
Jacinta Stevens, 31, was at a Pittsburgh bar for nearly three hours before the incident on Jan. 29, trooper Rocco Gagliardi said. Her car struck an unoccupied vehicle in the bar’s parking lot, and then a nearby parked car, before police said she drove off and made her way to the Parkway.
Once on Parkway East, Stevens veered across three lanes of traffic as she was driving outbound when she lost control of her Ford Explorer, police said.
Her vehicle hit a nearly 6-foot-tall snowbank, traveled over a concrete barrier and plummeted into the river, police said.
“Speed was a factor in this case, for sure,” Gagliardi told reporters Tuesday. “It’s still, at the end of the day, a tragic event.”
Officials did not release her blood alcohol content.
The crash happened in the late afternoon in Pittsburgh’s Bluff neighborhood, south of UPMC Mercy Hospital.
Three divers from Pittsburgh’s River Rescue broke through surface ice about 5 inches thick, then pulled Stevens, 31, of Penn Hills, from the driver’s seat, authorities said. The divers used a basket to pull her out of the water.
They resuscitated Stevens at the scene. She later died at UPMC Presbyterian.
Emily Bourne, a Pittsburgh police spokeswoman, previously said the crash happened about 4:30 p.m. State police said troopers were dispatched at 5:14 p.m.
About 50 first responders from the city’s EMS, police and fire bureaus responded to the crash scene.
Stevens was an employee of the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, according to Molly Onufer, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office.
She worked for the authority for the past two months as a housing specialist, according to Michelle Sandidge, the housing authority’s chief community affairs officer.
Gagliardi said in January the incident doesn’t define that stretch of the Parkway East as problematic or crash-prone.
“We cover a lot of interstates, a lot of streets,” he said Friday. “There are a lot of hot spots. But I wouldn’t call two accidents in 40 years a trouble area.”