Woman, Son Die in Fall Off Freeway Bridge

A Moorpark mother and her young autistic son, taking a middle-of-the-night drive to lull the boy to sleep, somehow fell to their deaths from a high freeway bridge Wednesday after pulling over with a flat tire.

Jacqueline Bickmann, 29, was pronounced dead at the scene. It took paramedics about 45 minutes, hacking their way through dense brush in darkness, to find her crumpled body near the banks of a stream far below the bridge connecting California 23 and the Simi Valley Freeway (118).

Her 4-year-old son, Garett, lay a few feet away, still with a faint pulse. He was rushed to Simi Valley Adventist Hospital, but died soon after.

Ventura County Sheriff’s Department investigators said they have no clues to explain why the woman and her son went over the freeway’s thigh-high concrete rail.

“They could have sat on the wall and fell, she could have jumped, someone could have pushed her--we don’t know,” said Senior Deputy Ed Tumbleson.

The department is pursuing the case as a “suspicious” death, Tumbleson said. “It’s being treated with the same care as if it were a homicide,” he said, adding that the department did not yet consider it a homicide.

Lawrence Bickmann, Jacqueline’s husband, could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A man answering the door at their home said the family would issue a statement later through police.

Tumbleson said Jacqueline Bickmann left her home around 2 a.m., hoping that a drive in the family’s white GMC Jimmy would make Garett sleepy.

At 3:17 a.m., California Highway Patrol officers noticed the Jimmy parked on the far right side of the freeway’s southbound lanes, about midway across the bridge. The right front tire had gone flat, leaving marks in the road as it deflated.

The officers stopped to give assistance, but couldn’t find the driver. Pulling out their flashlights, they leaned over the bridge’s concrete wall and saw the bodies 100 feet below.

It took paramedics about 45 minutes to reach the woman and her son, stranded in a broad swath of bushes and weeds along the Arroyo Simi, hundreds of yards from the closest streets.

“Access was a problem,” said paramedic Rob Rolfe. “We ended up scrambling down the side of the bridge, down a pretty steep embankment.”

When Rolfe arrived, the woman was dead. The little boy still had a pulse but had stopped breathing. A CHP officer performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on him, Rolfe said.

“It was clear from the trauma to their bodies that they came off the bridge,” Rolfe said.

The paramedics hiked east across the dry arroyo and then along the railroad tracks for about a mile before getting to the ambulance. The boy was taken to Simi Valley Adventist Hospital, arriving an hour after paramedics responded to the emergency. He died at the hospital, never regaining consciousness.

Autopsies showed that the mother died from multiple blunt force injuries, while her son died of blunt force neck and abdominal injuries, said senior medical examiner Craig Stevens. The injuries were consistent with a fall from a great height.

Although the manner of death is still under investigation, Stevens said, the bodies showed no evidence of a struggle or foul play.