Highway Accident Victim Never Failed to Lend Hand

Frank Romero was never one who could leave someone stranded for help on the road.

“If he saw people stranded he would stop to help them. That was his joy, helping people out,” said Romero’s daughter, Gilda Jimenez.

Romero’s last good deed cost him his life.

The 62-year-old Los Nietos man and a co-worker were driving down the Corona Expressway near the Riverside-San Bernardino county line Monday when they spotted a car on fire. Authorities say Romero stopped his truck and put out the flames with a fire extinguisher.

He put the extinguisher away, then turned to his co-worker, Aubrey Cook, and said, “Well, I’ve done my good deed for the day.”

Romero never saw what hit him next.

He was struck by a van towing a 24-foot trailer as he was making his way to the other side of the road to give comfort to the car’s owner, a woman who had been escorted with her baby to safety by another couple.

He died later that night of internal injuries at Loma Linda University Medical Center, a hospital official said.

Relatives and friends contacted last week expressed shock at news of his death. But none were surprised by his last deed.

“That’s the kind of person Frank was,” said Gary Orozco, a neighbor of Romero in the unincorporated community of Los Nietos, near Whittier. “Always helping out someone in trouble.”

Jimenez, 27, said she could remember her father being a good Samaritan ever since she was 7 years old.

“My father and I were driving to Los Angeles and we saw a Mexican family stranded on the highway with their station wagon heating up,” she said.

“My father stopped his car. . . . He saw they were poor and he bought and installed a new hose for their car,” she recalled.

When he would help people, she said, he would always remind her, “You have to take care of people because that’s what it’s all about.”

Although her family was poor, she said her father always “would take in a stray dog” or “put up kids who had problems or were runaways, and he never asked for anything in return.”

His friend, Jesse Macias, 53, said Romero had tried to keep his spirits up since the death of his second wife from cancer earlier this year. “He would still buy drinks, trying to keep everybody happy,” Macias said.

His neighbor Orozco said, “I’m not surprised by what he did--it’s just that he died doing it.”

Romero is survived by seven daughters and one son.