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The woman who died after a tree fell on State Highway 1 north of Dunedin yesterday was known to everyone in the small community in which she lived.
Sonya Billyard, a member of the Waikouaiti Coast Community Board, said that the death of Den Thi Baird (51) would greatly affect the community.
Ms Baird, who escaped Cambodia to New Zealand in 1994, introduced the community to Asian food while running the Waikouaiti Fishinn with her husband Alister Baird for years before moving away last year, Billyard said.
Billyard said he would deliver a care package to Mr. Baird tonight.
She knew Ms. Baird only as an acquaintance, but both Ms. Baird and her husband were highly visible members of a close-knit community that would rally around the grieving family.
“Everybody knows who they are,” Billyard said. “I still can’t believe it.
“To be honest, I still can’t figure it out.”
Police named Ms. Baird this afternoon as the victim, saying she was killed in an accident. Stuff reports that she was a passenger in a car whose driver was understood to have swerved to avoid the tree. Then the car left the road and climbed onto the roof.
A Newshub report from 2009 told the story of how Ms. Baird’s Cambodian family was torn apart by the infamous Khmer Rouge regime.
At that moment he had an emotional reunion by video call with his brother 18,000 km away in France; He hadn’t seen him since 1975, when he fled his homeland with the French army.
Soldiers took her father away when she was 7 years old, Newshub reported.
Emergency services were called for the accident that killed Ms. Baird, south of Waikouaiti, at 12:10 pm yesterday.
An Otago Daily Times photographer at the scene said a tree had fallen at the foot of the Kilmog and there was a car heading south upside down in a ditch.
A spokesperson for St John confirmed that two people were taken to Dunedin Hospital with moderate injuries, and police later confirmed that a third person, now known as Ms. Baird, had died.
A witness told Stuff that his own vehicle narrowly avoided hitting the tree, and another vehicle was nearly crushed. It had branches under the wheel.
A spokeswoman for the New Zealand Transport Agency said it carried out the logging, under traffic management, earlier this week at a separate site about 100 meters from where the accident occurred.
The tree collapse at the crash site was not related to tree removal work done earlier in the week, the spokeswoman said.
There were no obvious environmental factors, such as high winds in the area at the time of the accident that caused the tree to fall.
But this and other details would be covered in the police investigation.
The agency’s Coastal Otago highway maintenance team, which managed nearly 800km of roads and road reserves, had an ongoing program to identify dangerous trees and carry out their removal throughout the region, he said.
All the poplars in the group of wild trees near the road where the tree fell yesterday would be removed in the next two weeks.
