One dead, others hurt in Stony Point crash

<p>Dark brown smoke rose from a mangled minivan surrounded by a large cluster of police and highway patrol cars, ambulances and fire engines, leaving no doubt about the seriousness of the noontime crash on Stony Point Road Thursday.</p><p>Moments before, Alma Crowder, a 42-year-old Rohnert Park mother, lay on the asphalt of Stony Point Road, after being ejected from a white minivan that had just burst into flames after crashing head-on into another minivan driven by a Santa Rosa grandmother.</p><p>Crowder would succumb to her injuries, dying three hours later at Santa Rosa's Memorial Hospital.</p><p>Her sons, Ryan Crowder, 22, the driver, and Jesse Crowder, 24, both managed to escape their burning 1996 Toyota Sienna, with the help of passersby who assisted them, officials said. They sustained critical injuries.</p><p>The grandmother, Donna Brockwell, 58, of Santa Rosa, was extricated by emergency crews and suffered unspecified moderate to major injuries, said the CHP.</p><p>Her 5-year-old grandson was removed from his safety seat by a woman, another passerby, and placed on the side of the road with a broken arm.</p><p>For those at the scene, it was a race against time to save lives.</p><p>Jeoff Quell, 45, self-employed and a resident of Sebastopol, was driving south on Stony Point Road when he saw the crash.</p><p>Quell said there was already another passerby trying to get one of the Crowders out of a van. He went over and checked the burgandy minivan and saw that the woman and child were not too badly hurt.</p><p>He said a man who was trying to help the Crowder brothers said he needed help.</p><p>“The van was starting to ignite,” Quell said. “That's when I went into a truck that was stopped in traffic and opened up the door and got the fire extinguisher... if the fire extinguisher wasn't there the gentleman would have burnt. It was like something you see on TV.”</p><p>A local property owner, Zeke Ortiz, also raced to the fiery scene with a small fire extinguisher he pulled out of his truck, after hearing an explosion.</p><p>“When I came out here there were bodies all over the asphalt,” said Ortiz. “There was a body on the asphalt, face down, lifeless, and when the paramedics got there they worked on her and we noticed she was moving,” he said.</p><p>Santa Rosa Fire Batallion Chief Mark Basque said it took 10 minutes to extricate Donna Brockwell from the burgundy minivan she was driving. It's front end was badly smashed, but the safety seat which secured the 5-year-old was “properly seat-belted,” and intact, limiting the child's injuries to the broken arm.</p><p>CHP Sgt. Allan Capurro said the white Sienna was seen traveling northbound at a high rate of speed. He said it drifted off the road onto the shoulder and then back across the road into an oncoming lane, striking the southbound Sienna head-on.</p><p>“I lost my wife,” said Todd Crowder, who was being comforted by other family members in the parking lot of Memorial Hospital following the crash. He described his wife as a “great person, real spiritual. She loved life and lived for her kids.”</p><p>Crowder said his two sons underwent surgery Thursday afternoon and that his son Ryan, the driver of the minivan, “doesn't know yet” about the death of his mother.</p><p>“My son Jesse, I told him just before he went into surgery,” he said.</p><p>He said Jesse suffered a broken femur and had pins in his ankle and other injuries. Ryan's injuries, he said, included a broken femur, hip, ribs and lacerated liver and other internal injuries.</p><p>The crash remained under investigation.</p>