CARLSBAD — Authorities have identified the pedestrian killed in a suspected DUI hit-and-run on Carlsbad Boulevard as 45-year-old Carlsbad resident Vanessa Wheyland.
Wheyland was crossing Carlsbad Boulevard and Redwood Avenue with her husband and 12-year-old son when she was struck by a vehicle around 7:45 p.m. on Sept. 15, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office. She was taken to Sharp Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, where she was pronounced dead at 8 p.m.
The medical examiner determined that Wheyland died from multiple blunt-force injuries and ruled her death an accident.
Carlsbad police arrested Fernando Saldana, 26, of Escondido, after investigators used evidence from the scene, witness interviews, license plate readers and air support to locate him.
At his Sept. 18 arraignment, Saldana pleaded not guilty to murder, gross vehicular manslaughter, DUI causing injury or death, and leaving the scene of a collision resulting in injury or death. Prosecutors also said Saldana was driving with a suspended license, according to news reports.
A judge denied bail.
According to prosecutors, Saldana allegedly abandoned his damaged vehicle on Oak Avenue and fled the scene before calling 911 around 10:22 p.m. and admitting that he was the driver.
Saldana had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.084 when he was tested several hours after the collision, prosecutors said. He had completed probation for a 2023 misdemeanor DUI conviction two months earlier and had received a Watson advisement — a formal warning that causing a death while impaired in the future could lead to a murder charge.
Police booked Saldana at the Vista Detention Facility. The investigation remains ongoing.
Wheyland was a mother of three, and her family and friends packed the courtroom for Saldana’s arraignment, many wearing white ribbons in her honor.
A memorial near the Carlsbad State Beach jetty has grown in the days after her death, while an online fundraiser for her family had raised more than $160,000 as of Sept. 18, according to news reports.
“She is someone that won’t be duplicated ever,” Wheyland’s friend Bridgett Ashby-Aldrich told CBS 8. “We lost a very special person.”
