Driver's quick thinking prevents head-on crash on GG Bridge

A Mill Valley man prevented a potentially serious crash on the Golden Gate Bridge today by using his pickup truck to guide a sport utility vehicle - in which the driver had gone unconcious - away from oncoming traffic, the California Highway Patrol said.

A 62-year-old Tiburon woman driving south over the bridge at 6:50 a.m. slumped over her steering wheel after suffering a medical condition from which she later died.

John Beatty, a 50-year-old electrician who was driving to work across the bridge as he's done almost every weekday for the past 30 years came up behind the Jeep Grand Cherokee stopped in the second lane from the center divide.

"I nearly hit it, and the car behind me nearly hit me," Beatty said. "All of the sudden the vehicle in front of me starts to drive to the left very slowly."

The Jeep was headed toward oncoming traffic.

"You never know what you're going to do when something like that happens," Beatty said. "I didn't think about it. I just did it."

Beatty drove up along side the car, saw the woman slumped over the wheel and acted quickly. He maneuvered his Ford F350 pickup in front of her vehicle to block it from moving into the oncoming cars.

"I let her hit me," Beatty said.

Then - with the Jeep still moving - Beatty used his truck to guide it across two lanes of traffic to the right hand curb as other cars passed, he said.

"They were going crazy all around us, but as soon as they saw what I was doing they left me a big hole to do this maneuver," Beatty said. "Everybody just kind of stopped to let me slowly pull off to the right to park her."

The CHP credited Beatty with selfless act that prevented a potentially "extremely serious" headon collision on the bridge.

Beatty said he called the CHP and pounded on the woman's windows.

But she was unconscious and the doors were locked, Beatty said.

A CHP officer arrived on the scene and smashed a window to unlock the woman's door, and a paramedic found a pulse and began CPR, Beatty said.

The woman was taken to California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, where she later was pronounced dead, authorities said.

"When you think about all the lawsuits and liability that goes on today, I probably wouldn't have done it," Beatty said. "But you don't think. I saw she was going into oncoming traffic, and it would have been a horrible accident."

Beatty said that afterward, he pulled off into a parking lot to calm down for an hour as his adrenaline raced.

"I lead a kind of low-key life. Excitement's not my bag," he said.