Outing with friends ends in tragedy

<p>The five Cloverdale friends had been to a play in Santa Rosa on Sunday afternoon and were headed for dinner in Geyserville — part of a regular Sunday outing for a large group of women.</p><p>Lyndsay Mazany, 27, had come to Wine Country from San Francisco with three friends for wine tasting.</p><p>At about 5:30 p.m. the two groups came together violently on a sharp curve on Geyserville Avenue when Mazany, suspected of driving drunk, crossed the center line.</p><p>In a broadside collision, Mazany smashed into the left passenger side of the car full of women. Close friends Nancy “Sue” McBride and Beverly Jones, both 77, died instantly.</p><p>The three others in the car suffered serious injuries and remained hospitalized Monday.</p><p>Katherine Hinzman, 56, a library technician at the Cloverdale Library, was driving. She suffered moderate injuries and Monday was in fair condition. Barbara King, 70, had major injuries and was listed in serious condition. Alice Sheperla, 82, was in fair condition.</p><p>Neither Mazany nor her passengers were injured. She was traveling with her boyfriend, his father and another male friend, the CHP said.</p><p>On Tuesday Mazany, who was being held in Sonoma County Jail, was to appear in Superior Court in Santa Rosa for arraignment on manslaughter and drunken driving charges.</p><p>A CHP investigator on Monday was attempting to retrace the route of the Mazany group “.<TH>.<TH>. to find out how much they'd been drinking, if any wine people in the tasting room observed any unusual behavior,” said CHP spokesman Officer Jon Sloat. </p><p>The proliferation of wine tasting rooms in Sonoma County has raised some concern in government and community circles about the implications for public safety. The county board of supervisors, reacting to critics who were worried that tasting room hours were encroaching into the traditional “cocktail hour,“ this year moved to limit hours of operation.</p><p>Sloat, however, downplayed the connection between tasting rooms and DUI accidents. “Crashing after wine tasting is kind of unusual given the number of wineries around here,” he said.</p><p>The five Cloverdale women were part of a group that regularly shares Sunday activities, said Marianne McBride, daughter-in-law of Sue McBride.</p><p>“It's what she and her friends did almost every single Sunday, go to a play or the symphony or an opera, a movie,” said McBride. “Sometimes it included a meal and sometimes it didn't.”</p><p>The women who died, McBride and Jones, were very close. Both widows, they took a cruise to South America together and were planning a trip to the East Coast this year for the fall colors. </p><p>“She and my mother-in-law would call at 8:30 every morning to make sure the other one was OK,” said McBride, who is executive officer of the Sonoma County Council on Aging.</p><p>Father Thomas Devereaux, pastor of the Catholic Church of St. Peter in Cloverdale, where Jones had worshipped, said both women were active in the small, tight-knit town.</p><p>“These two people are going to be missed in this community,” he said. “Everybody knows of them.”</p><p>On Sunday, at least two carloads of women had gone to see The Full Monty, a Summer Repertory Theater production at Santa Rosa Junior College.</p><p>Afterward, “there was a discussion about who was going to go to dinner. (McBride) chose the car that went to dinner,” said her daughter-in-law. The other women skipped dinner and went home in the other car.</p><p>McBride, Jones and King climbed into the back seat of Hinzman's 2001 Subaru Forester for the ride to Geyserville and an evening meal at a favorite restaurant.</p><p>On a 90-degree turn on Geyserville Avenue near Banti Lane, Mazany's 2004 Hyundai Santa Fe SUV crossed over and drove into Hinzman's car, the CHP said. On Monday, shattered glass littered the scene and a bouquet of flowers was attached to a sign warning drivers of a sharp bend in the road and of a 15 mph speed limit. </p><p>“It's incredibly tragic,” Marianne McBride said. “I feel for the family of the gal who hit them. I can't imagine how she's feeling.”</p><p>Other friends of the women said the fact that Mazany had apparently been drinking too much added an edge to the pain of the loss.</p><p>“We see so much death here because of our population, and a drunk driver is just not okay,” said Brooke Greene, assistant director of the Cloverdale Senior Center, where both women visited and McBride also taught Spanish.</p><p>“We see so much loss from just natural causes, to have someone taken by a drunk driver is just too much to bear,” Greene said.</p><p>Mazany was driving a vehicle registered to her father. It had Kansas license plates, the CHP said.</p><p>Sue McBride was an active senior. “She just epitomized what you want to experience as a healthy, happy active senior,” said her daughter-in-law. “We expected her around for another 20 years.”</p><p>McBride had taught Spanish at Sonoma Valley High School for years. After moving to Cloverdale in about 1995, she taught Spanish in schools there for a few years before retiring. She also volunteered as a translator, offering her language skills at the homeless shelter and food bank.</p><p>“She had a tremendous amount of discreet charity, in that there was no publicity whatsoever,” said Devereaux. “A lot of people owe their present situations to her and most of them don't even know it.”</p><p>Jones also had a curious intellect — she studied theology with him in classes he taught — and was similarly motivated by a sense of social justice, Devereaux said.</p><p>“She discreetly encouraged people to rethink themselves out of their social biases. If they were prejudiced or racist, against poor people or people who were disabled, she would very nicely let them know they were wrong,” he said.</p><p>She was also known as someone to whom others could turn, he said.</p><p>“People came to her with their personal problems and they knew she cared,” he said.</p>