A Newport Beach man, who reportedly admitted drinking at a Palm Springs bar before allegedly driving into and killing a Cathedral City woman on a Riverside County roadway, was arrested for the killing over the weekend.
James Coley, 49, was held because of what he told police and the fact that he reportedly appeared to be intoxicated.
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Coley was driving on Date Palm Drive between Converse Road and Gerald Ford Drive around 1:45 a.m. Saturday when 39-year-old Lourdes Jauregui was struck and thrown 30 feet. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The woman had been walking with a man who ran away before police arrived, and though authorities want to question him as a witness, they also believe he's a Hispanic parolee who goes by the name “Rafa.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.