John Jefferson
Background: Maryland’s Highway 210 (WRC). Top inset: Loretta Lynn Canter (WRC). Bottom inset: Sandra Abarca Orellana (WRC).
Two families are grieving after a pair of hit-and-run incidents resulted in the deaths of two Maryland mothers, both of them occurring on what has become known as the “highway of death.”
Loretta Lynn Canter was a 40-year-old mother of three children who was killed on Highway 210 near Farmington Road in Accokeek. At around 9:50 p.m. on Nov. 22, Prince George’s County Police responded to a collision involving a pedestrian, who turned out to be Canter. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
On Nov. 21, Sandra Abarca Orellana, 52 years old and also a mother of three, was struck and killed by a motorist after 9 p.m. while crossing a different part of Highway 210 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. WRC, a local NBC affiliate, reported that an off-duty police officer was one of the first on the scene of Orellana’s death. She was also pronounced dead at the scene.
While there was no description of the vehicle that hit Canter, police said that the vehicle that allegedly hit Orellana was a burgundy, four-door sedan. Police have asked the public to aid them in finding the two separate motorists — neither of whom remained on the scene.
Both women died while walking along different parts of Highway 210, and they are just two out of nearly 100 cases of deaths reported to have happened on the same road since 2007. A local public safety group, the Route 210 Traffic Safety Committee, started tracking fatalities on the so-called “highway of death” the same year and have so far counted 94.
In 2024 alone, 21 people were killed on Highway 210, 11 of them hit-and-run incidents. The committee’s founder Ron Weiss told WRC in an interview, “I was hoping we could make it through the rest of the year without another fatality, and being so close to Thanksgiving, it’s just so sad.”
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Canter’s children also spoke to WRC and emotionally described what their mother would miss. Her son said through tears, “If she would have made it another month, she could have made Thanksgiving, her birthday and Christmas.” Her family has set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral costs.
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