Local News in Brief : San Diego

A 75-year-old La Jolla man was killed when his car slammed into a parked postal semitrailer on Interstate 5 in Sorrento Valley, the California Highway Patrol said Wednesday.

The fatality was the first of three incidents involving postal vehicles reported within a 15-hour span, authorities said.

Albert Hodge was killed Wednesday after the driver of a U. S. Postal Service semi-trailer stopped in the far right lane on southbound Interstate 5, where it merges with Interstate 805, to help Marines pull large boxes off the freeway and put them back on a Marine Corps truck about 7 p.m., CHP spokesman David Jones said.

Hodge rammed into the unoccupied postal truck and died 20 minutes later of a broken neck, Jones said.

In unrelated incidents, police received a report shortly after 10 a.m. Wednesday of a postal truck driver driving recklessly in the 2500 block of Clairemont Drive. The caller said the man did not appear to be wearing a uniform, San Diego Police Detective Richard Shaw said.

Fewer than 5 minutes later, police answered a call that 17 empty U. S. mail sacks were scattered on I-5 near Clairemont Drive, Shaw said. The two incidents were not related, Shaw said, and neither driver was apprehended.

“It was a real coincidence,” he said. “It’s one in a million that we get two calls within 5 minutes of each other in the same area involving the Postal Service.”