The woman who died after a tree fell across State Highway 1 north of Dunedin yesterday was known to all in the small community she lived in.
Waikouaiti Coast Community Board member Sonya Billyard said the death of Den Thi Baird (51) would hit the community hard.
Mrs Baird, who escaped Cambodia for New Zealand in 1994, introduced the community to Asian food while she ran the Waikouaiti Fishinn with her husband Alister Baird for years before stepping away last year, Ms Billyard said.
Ms Billyard said she would deliver a care package to Mr Baird this evening.
She knew Mrs Baird as an acquaintance only, but both Mrs Baird and her husband were highly visible members of a tight-knit community that would rally around the grieving family.
"Everyone knows who they are," Ms Billyard said. "I still can’t believe it.
"I still can’t get my head around it, to be honest."
Police named Mrs Baird this afternoon as the victim, saying she died in a crash. Stuff is reporting that she was a passenger in a car whose driver was understood to have swerved to avoid the tree. The car then left the road and flipped on to its roof.
A 2009 Newshub report told the story of how Mrs Baird’s Cambodian family was ripped apart by the infamous Khmer Rouge regime.
At the time she had an emotional video call reunion with her brother 18,000km away in France; she had not seen him since 1975, when he fled their homeland with the French army.
Their father was taken away by soldiers when she was 7 years old, Newshub reported.
An Otago Daily Times photographer at the scene said a tree had come down at the bottom of the Kilmog, and there was a southbound car upside down in a ditch.
A St John spokesman confirmed two people were taken to Dunedin Hospital with moderate injuries, and police later confirmed a third person, now known to be Mrs Baird, had died.
A witness told Stuff his own vehicle narrowly avoided hitting the tree, and another vehicle came close to being crushed. It had branches under the wheel.
An NZ Transport Agency spokeswoman said it undertook tree felling, under traffic management, earlier this week at a separate site about 100m away from where the crash happened.
The collapse of the tree at the crash site was unrelated to the tree removal work undertaken earlier in the week, the spokeswoman said.
There were no obvious environmental factors such as strong winds in the area at the time of the crash that caused the tree to fall.
But this and other details would be covered in the police investigation.
The agency’s Coastal Otago highway maintenance team, which managed nearly 800km of highway and road reserve, had a continuous programme to identify hazardous trees and undertake their removal throughout the region, she said.
All the poplars in the grouping of wilding trees near the highway where the tree fell yesterday would be removed in the next two weeks.
