Mother kills herself while driving after daughter, 9, refused to shoot her

It was like the driver had hit the brakes for an animal darting across the road, Dustin Stober said. Except the road was the 75 mph passing lane of Interstate 10. And there was a little girl jumping out of the passenger seat of the black Nissan, waving her hands and screaming that her mother had been shot. Naval Petty Officer 2nd Class Stober knew something was wrong.

"I've never had this happen before," said Stober, 30, of Lancaster, Calif., who was driving to Dallas with his family. "I'd seen the wound before. I've lost officers. I lost a pilot. I've witnessed friends die." Corina Dominguez, 33, of Baldwin Park, Calif., had shot herself in the chest on Thursday morning - after a failed attempt to get her 9-year-old daughter to kill her, said New Mexico State Police Lt. Roman Jimenez. Sgt. Dominguez, a medic with the Army Reserve's 437th Ground Ambulance Company, was driving with her daughter and their two dogs when she began to breathe heavily - possibly from an asthma or emphysema attack - and handed her daughter a 9 mm handgun, Jimenez said.



"She told her to shoot her. And she wouldn't," said Jimenez. "The daughter said she has had these kinds of attacks before, but she'd never been suicidal." After firing the shot, the car rolled to a stop, just slightly in the paved left shoulder of the road, in a construction zone about 25 miles west of Las Cruces. Stober, a Naval contractor who trained in emergency response with the Auxiliary Security Force, immediately pulled in front of Dominguez's car in a blocking maneuver and told his wife to call 911.

Deborah Stober, 25, a daycare worker who had the couple's two sons, ages 9 and 7, in the back seat, rushed the little girl to her car. Inside the black Nissan, Dominguez, suffering from a massive chest wound, struggled to breathe. Her pulse and breathing became slow. "I knew what to do in this situation," Stober said. "And I couldn't do anything." Stober put the car - still in drive - in park and turned it off. He retrieved the handgun from the floor in front of the woman, unloaded it and placed it on the side of the road. He laid the seat back and covered her with a blanket one of the construction workers provided. "I hope the daughter's OK," he said.