Married Couple Killed In Monterey Co. Crash Days Before Their Anniversary

MONTEREY COUNTY, CA — A San Jose couple who died in a car crash on U.S. Highway 101 near Bradley last month has been identified by the Monterey County Sheriff's Office as 39-year-old Antti-Pekka Hynninen and his 30-year-old wife Tram Tran Hynninen. The Hynninens were driving home from Monterey around 10:30 a.m. on May 21 when their 2010 Honda Civic was hit head-on by a brown 2003 Ford F-350 that had lost control from a flat tire, according to the California Highway Patrol and a Plumfund campaign set up to raise money for the funeral.

The truck went through the median and into the northbound lanes south of Bradley Road. The 60-year-old Salinas man driving the truck and his two passengers, both 37-year-old women from Seaside, were taken to hospitals for treatment of minor injuries.

Tram Tran Hynninen was driving the Civic at the time of the crash, CHP officers said. After the first crash, a 32-year-old Davis woman who had been driving behind the Hynninens in a 2008 Toyota Corolla crashed into the truck. The truck and the Civic sustained major damage in that crash, but the Corolla sustained only minor damage and the driver was uninjured, according to the CHP.

Antti-Pekka Hynninen, who went by A.P., earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in 2005. Since November, A.P. Hynninen had worked as a senior developer technology engineer at Nvidia, a graphics processing unit company in Santa Clara.

Tram Tran Hynninen completed her master's degree in physician assistant studies from Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, in December and had officially graduated two weeks before the crash. The woman was the youngest of seven children and earned her bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Denver, according to Union College officials.

The Hynninens were days from their third wedding anniversary and were described as happy, energetic and outdoorsy. As of this afternoon, the Plumfund campaign at had raised more than $26,300 for memorial expenses, including travel for family from Finland and Vietnam to Denver, where a funeral service is planned for Friday morning. Click here to donate.

By Bay City News

Photo via Shutterstock