One person has died after a multi-vehicle pileup shut down the Interstate 5 northbound off-ramp to Genesee Avenue in the University City area on Monday morning, according to the California Highway Patrol. A San Diego police officer performed CPR at the scene on a severely injured victim, who was later transported to a hospital and died, CHP Officer Michael Meza said.
The crash was reported shortly before 8 a.m., per Meza, as detailed by the San Diego Union-Tribune. The newspaper's headline described it as a six-car pileup, while a separate dispatch log tracked by chpfatal.com shows CHP initially logging the crash as a four-vehicle collision at 7:55 a.m. before updating it to five vehicles a minute later. Those entries were preliminary, and the final vehicle count has not been independently reconciled in the available records.
CPR Performed as Off-Ramp Shut Down
The dispatch feed shows that at 8:06 a.m., CHP sent out a notification saying CPR was in progress and requesting that both the Genesee off-ramp and the adjoining on-ramp be closed. Five minutes later, at 8:11 a.m., the feed noted that police had the Interstate 5 North/Genesee off-ramp shut down entirely.
Multiple people were transported to hospitals for crash-related injuries, though authorities have not released details about the extent of those injuries. The off-ramp was closed for more than an hour before reopening to traffic around 9:45 a.m., Meza said.
White Van Reported in Collision
Among the entries on the dispatch feed is a shared note, logged at 7:58 a.m., stating that a white van did not stop and collided into other vehicles.
As of the time of reporting, authorities had not released the identity of the person who died. The dispatch log remains the most detailed real-time account of how the scene unfolded, though it stops short of confirming how many vehicles were ultimately involved or the precise circumstances that led to the collision.
