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The 41-year-old owner of a dog-walking business and five dogs were killed in Long Beach, California, after the driver of a stolen van being chased by the police crashed into her vehicle, authorities said.
Jessica Bingaman, 41, was driving a Ford Escape on Tuesday morning in a residential area of the city south of Los Angeles when the van driver hit her vehicle and three additional parked cars, Long Beach police said.
Witnesses told NBC Los Angeles that the van was moving so fast they could barely register what was happening. Juanita Gaglio said all she could see was “a streak of white.”
Bingaman, a mother, had six dogs in her car with her.
“The white van hit the car with such force that it pushed it back into three other cars and knocked it back about fifteen feet,” Bingaman’s neighbor, Russell Thomas, told NBC Los Angeles.
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The suspect, Javier Olivarez, a Los Angeles resident, was arrested and faces charges for evading an officer, felony DUI and vehicular manslaughter.
Police said the chase began when officers spotted lthe stolen van and tried to pull Olivarez over at a traffic stop. Olivarez refused to stop, police said.
Officers chased him for a little over a mile before his vehicle crashed.
Bingaman was taken to a local hospital where she died. Four of the dogs with her died at the scene, and two were brought to a local veterinary hospital, where one died and the other remained seriously injured, police said.