She was riding the California Street line. The driver recalled the svelte, pale-skinned woman wearing cat-eye shades, in her twenties or so, with shiny black hair caught at the nape of her neck in a thick braid that reached half way down her back. She had crossed California from the south side and hopped on to a running board at Sansome, a couple of blocks before California begins to slope up Nob Hill. Just after the car crossed Kearney St., she appeared to lose her balance, according to a woman from Baltimore who had watched the young woman rummage through her shoulder bag with her free hand. Perhaps she was searching for a Kleenex, the bewildered, pink-faced, gray-haired lady surmised aloud to no one in particular as she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, the arm of a passerby slung across her ample, rounded shoulders.
The car lurched, the woman gave a little squeak, tipped back, and let go of her purse, the strap of which slipped from her shoulder to her forearm. The bag must have been heavy: the weight of it appeared to loosen her handhold. The woman from Baltimore said she would never forget the look on the falling woman's face: she appeared to be puzzled, more than frightened, when she tottered back, her left hand sliding as if the pole were greased. She flapped and flailed both arms, grappled for the pole, a hand, a bit of someone's coat, but by the time observers realized what was happening and reached out to her, she had already landed on the hood of a green Honda Accord that was speeding in the opposite direction to make the light at Kearney.
The driver slammed on the brakes when he saw the body flomp onto his car, heard the dull thud, felt the shock resonate through the vehicle into the seat of his pants, and the woman was thrown into the intersection, into the path of an SUV that rolled over her right leg without stopping. Witnesses said the driver was talking on a mobile phone and would have plowed over the woman's torso, had he not swerved to pass a red Beetle that was waiting to make a left turn onto California. No one noted the license number, though all agreed the driver was young, good-looking, and sported a goatee. As the Beetle driver passed behind the cable car the catastrophe unfolded in her peripheral vision: she saw the woman's flimsy frame fall from the cable car onto the Honda and in the rearview mirror followed her trajectory into the path of the SUV. Several other cable car passengers corroborated the two motorists' accounts, even some who were sitting on the north side of the vehicle, their backs to the scene.
The woman's purse strap had stayed hooked in the crook of her arm throughout the flight, and the bag's contents spilled onto the street when she hit the pavement, catching the attention of a tall, burly man who was buying flowers at the edge of the Bank of America plaza on the southeast corner of Kearny and California. His left hand, cragged with dirt, fisted a bouquet of pink Gerbera daisies, and a glistening track lined his dusty right cheek from his eye to his bushy red beard as he recounted for reporters how he had heard screeching tires and screaming voices in the intersection behind him, how he had turned toward the commotion only to see a bullet-shaped tube of lipstick and a crumpled white tissue roll and tumble past him, ushered along by cold, gray swaths of fog.