BELLEVUE, Wash. — The King County Medical Examiner’s Office on Tuesday released the names of the two people killed when Sunday’s windstorm knocked a tree down on to their car.
The medical examiner determined both died from multiple blunt force injuries, the Seattle Times reported. Their deaths were ruled an accident.
Camille Martlin, 59, and her son Max Martlin, 22, lived together in the Bellevue house where Camille grew up. They loved to paddleboard and hike together, often with their dogs, a pit bull rescue named Pebbles and her small-breed companion, Smokey, according to friends and family.
They had gone to Preston to pick up pumpkins and were on their way home when a huge tree crashed on to their white sedan, killing them both, according to Max’s father and King County Sheriff’s Sgt. Tim Meyer.
“It’s a freak accident,” said Meyer. “Just a moment or two’s difference could have drastically changed how this ended.”
The tree measured 8 feet in circumference at its base, Meyer said. The two were traveling along Preston-Fall City Road Southeast, a densely forested roadway that connects Interstate 90 to Fall City, when the tree landed across the car.
“It was truly a collision of inches and that it would take a mother and son is tragic,” Meyer said.
On Sunday wind gusts topping 60 mph also downed trees on Interstate 90 east of Seattle and cut power to more than 150,000 customers in the metro area and around Puget Sound. A large trough of low pressure, known as a bomb cylcone, hovered off the coast of the Pacific Northwest last weekend and drove repeated rounds of precipitation and high winds into Washington, Oregon and northern California.